Pragmatic Approaches To Translation Unit Based On Relevance Theory

Translation unit plays a significant role in translation studies. It is one of the complicated questions in translation theory and an important part in translation practice. Scholars abroad and at home have done many researches on translation unit, which are mainly from grammatical perspective, semantic perspective and pragmatic perspective. Many achievements are made through their studies. Relatively speaking, the establishment of translation unit needs further study.The study on the establishment of translation unit from pragmatic perspective is worth trying. Sperber and Wilson put forward relevance theory, which gives a detailed analysis of cognitive activities in human communication and provides a framework for translation studies. Under the framework of it, pragmatic translation unit is set to be the basic unit for analyzing and solving translation problems. To study translation unit based on pragmatic relation is to find pragmatic relation in source text with the aim of tackling translation problems by inference under cognitive context, in order to get optimal relevance and to successfully render the intentions of source text into target text. Besides, combined with translation practice, direct and indirect translation methods are introduced in terms of pragmatic translation unit.In this paper, pragmatic translation unit is discussed under the framework of relevance theory from an unchallenged perspective. It deals with analysis of translation problems and helps find solution to them, which is hopefully to make contributions to translation theory and translation practice.