A Relevance-theoretic Perspective Of Explicitation In Interpretation

The Relevance Theory put forward by Sperber and Wilson offered a new way to deal with human communication. They proposed that communication is in fact an ostensive-inferential process, which consists of ostensive behavior and inferential behavior. Ostension means that the speaker communicates his/her intention in such a way that is ostensive to the hearer while inference means the hearer makes inference according to the information given by the speaker and the context that he/she can find. The information conveyed in communication can be divided into informative intention and communicative intention. Based on the Relevance Theory, the communicators’behavior is based on the assumption that an optimal relevance exists in the behavior, that is, the communicators assume their behavior can create optimal contextual effects with the least effort to make.The Relevance Theory has been applied to many fields of studies ever since it was put forward. Since interpretation is one type of communication, communication theory should also be applicable to it. Because of the differences in grammar, culture and logic aspect of Chinese and English languages, interpreters have to follow the principles and methods of explicitation in order to achieve the equivalency to the source language. Therefore, explicitation is both important and inevitable in interpretation. In the past few decades, many scholars have been dedicating themselves to studying explicitation in translation. Some of them have sorted explicitation into different categories. However, explicitation in interpretation field is rarely studied and systematic theoretic foundation is far from existence.As is well known, consecutive interpretation is very different from translation in terms of note-taking, short-term memory, pressure, time limit and so on, so it’s difficult for the interpreter to explicate all the implicit messages in the source language. The decision made by the interpreter to make things explicit has a lot to do with what the speaker’s intentions and the audience’s anticipations The explicitation is most efficient if it saves the audience’s processing efforts to figure out what the speaker tries to get across to them.Based on optimal relevance in Relevance Theory, this paper proposes that the interpreter needs to explicate what is implicit in the source language if it can save audience’s processing efforts to realize contextual effects. Besides, this paper presents some advices, such as strengthening listening comprehension, cultivating cultural awareness and understanding non-verbal information, so as to help improve the quality of interpretation course.