The Translation Of Mission Statement From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Mission statement answers the questions of “what an organization is” and “what an organization should be”,and therefore is an important strategic tool to guide business activities in organizations.Nowadays,an increasing number of companies strive to expand internationally,so the translation of mission statement is a necessity and of great significance.However,previous studies on mission statement are mainly conducted in the management field,with little discussion concerning translation.This thesis attempts to explore the translation of mission statement from the perspective of relevance theory.Relevance theory,proposed by Sperber and Wilson,aims at explaining the internal mechanism in interpersonal communication.Under this theory,communication is an ostensive-inferential process in which ostensive refers to the communication action of the speaker and inferential means that of the receiver in order to identify the speaker's informative intentions.During the communication process,the speaker assumes that the ostensive stimulus is relevant to the receiver,and the receiver will also believe the stimulus is worth effort to make inferences.The participants in the communication will automatically pursue the optimal relevance through selecting the most relevant context to make inferences,and thus achieve the best balance between processing effort and contextual effect.Relevance theory is powerful to explain and guide the translation practice.According to relevance theory,translation is the double ostensive-inferential processes.In the first process,the translator makes effort to find the optimal relevance with the original text and achieves understanding and comprehension towards the text.In the second round,the translator conveys what he or she perceives to the target readers with the optimal relevance unchanged.In short,the translation activity is to achieve the optimal relevance between the original context and the target context.Based on relevance theory and through text analysis,the thesis finds that most translations of mission statements are able to recover the original author's intentions to the target readers,but there still exist some that cannot achieve the effect.The translator probably fails to take into consideration or properly handle the differences between the original context and the target context.This thesis further discovers that cognitive context's influence on the translation of mission statement can be observed at three levels.At linguistic level,Chinese and English mission statements have different word usages,syntax and discourse structures.In terms of emphasis on necessary components,Chinese mission statements stress serving their stakeholders,while English ones value customers,products or service.With regard to cultural differences,Chinese culture is collectivistic in nature and has high power distance,while American culture values individual benefit and has low power distance,all of which are embedded in their respective mission statements.As a result,translators should properly and effectively deal with those differences so as to achieve the optimal relevance between the original context and the target context.The translation should allow the target readers to have the same accessibility to the original author's intentions as the original readers.Through analysis of typical examples,the author finds that the principle of equal inferential distance can effectively guide translators to process the differences in linguistic context and situational context.The cultural variability in original and target context can be handled by employing the supplementary principle of keeping equal inferential distance.The above two principles are excellent in guiding actual and specific translations of missions statements.There still exist some limitations in this thesis to be improved in further studies.For one thing,the examples of mission statements analyzed in this thesis are of limited amount.For another,this thesis only employs relevance theory to examine and guide the translation of mission statement,without mentioning other translation theories.However,these limitations can in turn indicate and provide room for further studies on mission statement utilizing other translation theories.