Study on Relevance Theory and Translation

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Study on Relevance Theory and Translation 作者：Yanhui Pei XiaoXia You

来源：《ISTP》2014年第02期

Abstract. The starting point of this thesis is an intention to introduce a general view of relevance-based translation presented by Ernst-August Gutt. The main aim is to put relevance to a more applicable use in studying translation which involves in exlicatures and implicatures.

Key words： Relevance Theory， optimal Relevance， Explicatures， Implicatures

1. Introduction

Before Relevance Theory is introduced in detail， particular attention should be paid to communication. From Aristotle to modern semioticians， the theories of communication were mostly based on the single model—the code model with which the communication itself is interpreted as an encoding and decoding process. Paul Grice has proposed a quite different model， the inferential model. According to the inferential model， communication is achieved by producing and interpreting evidence. However， Sperber and Wilson （1995：1） advocated that ―the code model and the inferential model are not incompatible； they can be combined into various ways. Verbal communication involves both coding and inferential process.‖[1] According to Sperber and Wilson （1986a）， the crucial mental faculty that enables human beings to communicate with one another is the ability to draw inferences from people‘s behavior. In the processing of communication， one of its participants， the communicator， produces a stimulus—verbal or otherwise—from which the audience can infer what he ?means‘， or， in the terms of relevance theory， what his informative intention is. Taking both the communicator and the audience into consideration， Sperber and Wilson define communication as ?ostensive-inferential behavior‘. Appling this view point into information transfer of communication， the communicative process itself can be regarded as an inferential processing：

Ostensive-inferential communication： the communicator produces a stimulus which makes it mutually manifest to communicator and audience that the communicator intends， by means of this stimulus， to make manifest or more manifest to the audience a set of assumption. [2]

2. A survey of relevance theory

In the framework of relevance theory， verbal communication is taken as an ostensive-inferential process. That is to say， firstly， the communicator makes manifest to the recipient his or her intention in the form of ostensive stimulus on the basis of the presumption that the stimulus chosen is optimally relevant to the addressee； and then the recipient combines the ostensive stimulus with the contextual assumptions， particularly the mutually manifest contextual assumptions， to