Relevance Theory And Translation Practice

Translation is a complicated process. There have always been controversies over translation theories, especially that of literary works. When in translation practice, the translator is bound to be in a dilemma as to what strategy should be adopted to handle text with specific linguistic or cultural features. Relevance theory (RT) was first proposed by French scholar Dan Sperber and British scholar Deirdre Wilson in their joint work Relevance: Communication and Cognition in 1986, and has since been improved and applied to various fields of the humanities and social science. Translation is no exception.According to this theory, translation is a kind of communication, and the ultimate goal for translation is its optimal relevance to the source text. The rule of optimal relevance is believed to be able to match the source text communicator s intention with the target text audience s expectation. In essence, translation is a process of double ostensive-inferential communication, in which the translator plays both as a communicator and an audience. The process of translation is the one of inference and searching for relevance and the aim of translation is to find optimal relevance.Wilson s student, Ernst-August Gutt, is considered to be the first to apply RT to translation studies. However, Gutt just devoted himself only to explaining the nature of translation from the perspective of RT and he used very few examples from real practice of translation. This thesis tries to discuss relevance theory in translation practice. To illustrate the guiding value of relevance theory to translation, the English versions of Lao She s Luotuo Xiangzi are chosen for case study to analyze varied strategies that different translators adopt to handle language—specific or cultural-loaded expressions in their translations.It is concluded in this thesis that it is the translator s accurate assessment of the target reader s cognitive environment that more often than not decides the specific translation strategies. The ultimate evaluation for a translation is whether it effectively conveys the original intention and whether it yields optimal relevance in the target reader s cognitive environment, while the means of achieving optimal relevance do not have to be invariable. Therefore, the relevance theory sheds a new light on the nature of translation, highlighting the importance of translators.This thesis is a study of two English versions of Luotuo Xiangzi from the perspective of RT, which aims at arousing translators awareness of applying relevance—theoretic approach to translating literary works. Meanwhile the author hopes the discussion in this paper could, to some extent, shed light on translators in their prospective fieldwork.