On The Limitations Of The Relevance Theory To Legal Translation Practice

In the book Relevance: Communication and Cognition, Dan Sperber and DeidreWilson put forward the concept of Relevance for the first time, which marks the bornof the relevance theory. The relevance theory is the theory used to explain the rulesand regulations in the people’s daily communicative activity. According to therelevance theory, people’s communicative activity is actually an expressing-reasoningprocess through which the speaker expresses his will by expressive activity, while thelistener infers the real purpose of the speaker based on his discourse information andcontext.The birth of the relevance theory has immediately aroused the interests oflinguistic scholars. Created on the basis of Grace’s conversational theory as well asnew innovations, the relevance theory has been highly praised and applied inpragmatics, semantics, and discourse analysis and even in psychological linguistics,cognitive linguistics, and logic and so on. Meanwhile, the application of the relevancetheory into translation field has been receiving more and more attention.E. A Gutt published the book Relevance and Translation in1991, whichrepresented the beginning of research of the relevance theory into translation field.China’s linguists such as Lin Kenan, He Ziran, Zhao Yanchun and Wang Bin havemade many introductions and reviews on the relationship between the relevancetheory and translation, and for which most of scholars hold positive attitude towardtheir relationship and believe that the relevance theory could be the guidance intranslation practices. While a few scholars hold contrary opinions and insist that therelevance theory has limitations in the guidance of translation practice and can notexplain all the phenomena in translation.By reading a lot of works and papers, the author will start from a more narrow andmore concrete perspective—legal translation, to make further researches on thelimitations of the relevance theory to legal translation practice, and some inferior andimmature opinions will be put forward. In this thesis three questions will be answered:(1) Can the relevance theory explain all the problems existing in the process of translation?(2) Whether the interpreting power and guiding ability of the relevance theory arelimited to the legal translation?(3) In what aspects the limitations of the relevance theory are expressed to thelegal translation?. Due to the limited length of the paper and the author’s limited knowledge, thisresearch is only the preliminary research, serving as a modest spur to induce others tofurther the investigation in this field.