On The Interpreting Process Of Translator

The traditional way of translation study, which tends to prescribe translation principles, criteria and methods subjectively and empirically, has by far thrown obstacles in the way of the development of translation theory. With the progress of other relevant disciplines and the increasing need of the self-improvement of translation theory, a brand-new way of translation study, which draws on the research of other disciplines to study and describe the mental faculties of translators in the process of translation in a more objective and general way, is urgently needed.Following the very tendency, this article, based on relevance theory, audaciously embarks on investigating the mental faculties of a translator when he interprets the original text, and establishes an inferential model of interpretation, trying to give an explicit account of how the information-processing faculties of the translator's mind enable him to interpret the original text.This article consists of four parts, excluding the Introduction and Conclusion.Part One is a brief historical retrospect of models of interpreting process, in which models of Diller&Kornelms,Nida,Kade, Stein and Bell are briefly introduced and commented. The first four models study and describe translation process from different approaches of meaning theory, linguistics, communication theory and text theory respectively, but saying little about the mental faculties of translators, they only superficially touch on the operational process of translation. Bell's model, though drawing on the resources of systemic linguistics, cognitive science, psychology, artificial intelligence and information processing theory, has in fact not broken away from systemic linguistics, and has probed into the translator's brain nomore than the other four models. To solve the problems existing in the above models, this article presents a new approach of studying interpretation process of a translator, i.e. a relevance-theoretical approach, which probes into the mental faculties of a translator on the basis of the relevance theory. And at the same time, an inferential model is established, which is different from the Bell's in the following aspects: firstly, 'ostension' is used instead of 'clause' as the unit of interpretation; secondly, the term 'context', an important factor in the process of interpretation, is introduced to supplement the 'pure linguistic' operation in Bell's model; thirdly, the 'serial' feature of Bell's model is replaced by the 'inferential' feature of the inferential model; finally, the mental faculties of a translator in the process of interpretation is described, which, as the goal of this paper, is substantially different from Bell's model.The second part of this paper mainly deals with the nature of interpreting process under a relevance-theoretical approach. Several relevance-theoretical terms concerned with my study, such as ostensive-inference, context, semantic representation, prepositional assumption, the principle of relevance, are introduced and explained. Meanwhile, the relevance theory is introduced into the translation interpretation with some terms re-explained and re-defined, and a relevance-theoretical approach is set up to lay a solid foundation for the following discussions. The relevance-theoretical approach of translation interpretation is as follows: the interpretation process of translation is a kind of ostensive-inferential communication, during which the author, with an attentive communicative intention, will use a specific way of ostension to insure the reader/translator's obtainment of his intention; on the other hand, the reader/translator, guided by the principle of relevance, will use his capacity of inference, activating his cognitive context if necessary, to infer the author's intention in a non-demonstrative way.The third part, which is the most important and difficult part of this paper,focuses on the introduction and explanation of the inferential model established by the writer. First of all, the deductive and non-d...