A Practice-based Research On Neuroscience Textbook Translation From The Relevance Theory Perspective

In the scientific community, the 21st century is recognized as the century of brain. Neuroscience is an emerging inter-disciplinary branch of science about the complex human and animal nervous system, including brain science and other relevant areas, which is the important power to push the advance of contemporary life science. Currently, there is an increasing number of researches and publications on neuroscience; China’s research and education of neuroscience are also at a rapid developing stage. Therefore, authoritative neuroscience textbooks play a key role in further boosting China’s neuroscience researches.The thesis mainly analyzes the employment and embodiment of relevance theory in translating the textbook Principles of Neural Science. Relevance theory is put forward by Sperber and Wilson, which regards communication as an ostensive-inferential activity. Later, Gutt combines relevance theory with translation and points out that translation is a kind of communication, involving the cognitive and inferential process. Therefore, under the frame of relevance theory, translation is the ostensive-inferential communication. However, most of the prior studies apply relevance theory to linguistics, pragmatics, etc.; no research has been conducted on the neuroscience textbook translation from a relevance theory perspective. Based on the extensive translation practice, the research indicates that neuroscience textbook have three characteristics:a variety of neuroscience expressions, many complex sentences, elaborate figure captions. Under the direction of relevance theory, neuroscience expressions are further classified; proper strategies are applied to optimally translate complex sentences; figure captions are translated with textbook language features and inferential information. Therefore, relevance theory can effectively guide neuroscience textbook translation; this conclusion may be helpful to study the translation practice of neuroscience and other similar texts.