A Brief Study On The Translation Of Metaphor: A Pragma-Cognitive Approach With The Relevance Theory At Heart

English language is rich in metaphors, just as any other languages with a long history and a rich cultural heritage. Yet all the English metaphorical usages pose a fairly serious problem for Chinese college students when they are invited to translate metaphors into Chinese or vice versa. This paper will focus on the problem of metaphor understanding and its translation. While trying to make metaphors more accessible to Chinese college students, we will keep at heart the relevance theory (henceforth RT) (Sperber and Wilson, 1986a) as the theoretical foundation (Gutt, 2000). In daily communications, people always seek the most relevant perspective to understand each other, and they will at the same time observe the rule of optimal exertion of processing effort. Under the framework of RT, the interpretation and understanding of metaphors achieve a new altitude, which is of vital importance for producing a better translation work. In view of the complicated picture in the world of metaphors, the best support from RT could be laid out as following: first, RT distinguishes between the explicature and the implicature, it becomes increasingly clear "that RT alone is adequate—there seems to be no need for a distinct general translation theory" (Gutt, 2000). So we put RT at heart for theoretical support. Third, the teaching of better metaphor translation will be divided into four types, namely, literal translation, substitution, paraphrase and transliteration. All these approaches are put forward with typical examples from a variety of English materials. Translation of metaphors is just a touch stone in order to have new dimension in handling translation issues. This paper will more or less contribute a little to the students' improvements in English in particular and to their overall cognitive strength in general.