Relevance Translation Theory And Its Application To Translation Teaching

The domestic and overseas research upon translation theory, in recent decades, has shown a trend of diversified development. Different researchers have been working hard to explore in depth a variety of translation theories. And the argument between different translation schools has never stopped. In Sperber and Wilson's book, Relevance: Communication and Cognition, relevance theory was first proposed. Since then, it has been applied in various field such as psychology, literature, translation and linguistics etc.. Wilson's student E. A. Gutt first introduced relevance theory into an account for the translation phenomena. From the perspective of the RT, translation is a communicative activity between languages, inferential processes closely related to the mechanism of brain and translation is the interpretive use of the source language. involving not only the linguistic codes, but what is more important is the dynamic inference according to the dynamic context with relevance as the base. Accordingly, in translation, an intralingual or interlingual communication, relevance also serves as the base in the understanding of the source text, the choice-making process of linguistic codes in translating process. Relevance theory of translation renovates people's views and provides a macro-theoretical framework to translation, the value of which has got confirmed by most of the scholars while there are others voiced their different opinions on the explanatory power and applicability of RT. However, the studies of application of RT to translation teaching seems little and superficial. And in translation teaching of college education, the applied research on RT has to be further explored and validated.Based on RT itself and the previous research on Gutt's translation concepts, This research aims at the application of RTT to translation teaching in colleges, i.e. the focus of the research centers on the approach's applicability. For this reason, the researcher designed certain teaching steps and specific procedures according to the characteristics of both RT and China's higher education. In general, three major stages are involved. The first stage is the preparation stage, and instructors need to show learners much sample materials. If necessary, even some theoretical knowledge and translating techniques could be included. The second stage is the translation stage. Learners need to complete some practical translation tasks individually and the instructors should control the time and manage the whole class. The third stage is evaluation stage, and instructors in this stage should organize students to discuss and value the works of several studen,summarize translation experiences and enhancelearners'translation competence by doing some exercises.To further verify the effectiveness of the approach in translation teaching of colleges, relevant teaching experiment was designed by the researcher. The experiment consisting of 12 weeks was eventually carried out in Binzhou College in the latter half of 2010. Subjects involved include 80 third-year students from School of Business English of the college. The major of these students is English major and after graduation they have to seek jobs in positions related to foreign trade. Therefore, translation competence is quite crucial and necessary to them. Since the subjects are from two natural classes with each comprising 40 members, the researcher randomly chose one as the experiment class (EC) and the other as the control class (CC). Furthermore, two different teaching approaches were employed in the course of the experiment (RTT approach for EC and traditional approach for CC).