On Pragmatic Translation: A Study From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Two pragmatists, Sperber and Wilson, proposed relevance theory, which aroused great interest in the pragmatics circle and shed light on translation studies. Later, Gutt, their student, applied relevance theory to translation studies, and further illustrated its significance to translation. However, Gutt's translation theory lacks evidence of translation cases. Therefore, by applying basic caveats of relevance theory and analyzing some translation versions, the current author tries to explain what translation is and what translation should achieve.This thesis is divided into five parts.The first chapter illustrates some basic points of relevance theory, including the inferential nature of communication, optimal relevance and context. The second chapter explains what translation is from the perspective of relevance theory: translation is a special and complicated kind of communication, therefore it enjoys the nature of communication, that is, nature of ostension-inference; translation involves three kinds of persons, viz. the original writer, the translator and the target reader; and translation is the interpretive use of language, which may easily cause errors in interpreting and may not achieve complete equivalence in all aspects. However, from relevance perspective, translation should try to achieve pragmatic equivalence. The third chapter of this thesis uses translation cases to illustrate how to achieve pragmatic equivalence in translation. Therefore, it first introduces pragmatic differences in Chinese and English and possible pragmatic failures, then it uses specific examples to illustrate how to achieve pragmalinguistic andsociopragmatic equivalence, the essence of which is to render the same pragmatic force? in translation. Pragmatic force includes implicature and explicature. By taking literary translation as an example, this part also explains that translation should try to retain an implicature so as to meet the need of the target reader. At the same time, this part uses euphemism as another example to prove that when an implicature cannot be retained or retaining of an implicature may cause misunderstanding of the original, the implicature can be explicated. All in all, translation should take the cognitive ability of the target reader as a prerequisite and take it as the aim to guarantee that the target reader can infer out the same pragmatic force as the original text intends.After specific cases, the thesis summarizes some suggestions of relevance theory on pragmatic translation in Chapter Four and provides some case analysis on several genres of texts so as to demonstrate how pragmatic equivalence can be achieved respectively in these kinds of texts. In Chapter Five the author draws a conclusion that, fundamentally speaking, translation should aim at realizing the communicative intention of language; though helpful to translation studies, relevance theory still needs development.