Relevance Theory And Metaphor Translation

Metaphor as a language phenomenon has always been studied by scholars including not only the rhetoricians but also linguists, philosophers, psychologists and cognitive linguists. Therefore, the research on metaphor has also gone through the process from the pure rhetoric to other disciplines, which makes the metaphor study from narrow sense to broad sense. With the development of linguistics study, especially from the 21st century, a series of theories on the explanation of metaphor emerged. In 1986, Dan Sperber and Deidre Wilson proposed Relevance theory in their published book"Relevance: Communication and Cognition". The Relevance theory provides a new way to study metaphor while interpret ting communication and cognition. According to Relevance theory, metaphor is a kind of"loose talk", it is just an ordinary utterance which requires no special interpretive abilities but demands extra processing effort. Metaphor, as a natural outcome of some very general abilities and procedures used in verbal communication, can be well explained under Relevance theory. The interpretation to metaphor based on Relevance theory not only expands and develops the former metaphor study, meanwhile, it also points out that: metaphor is not only a language phenomena, to be more important, it is a way of thinking.Relevance theory is not a theory for translation; however, it can effectively explain the translation activity and then make guidance to translation. Relevance theory is a cognition theory as well as a communicative theory. On the basis of Relevance theory, translation can also be regarded as a communicative activity. Scholar Gutt firstly applied Relevance theory to translation study, showing that translation is a behavior for utterance communication, an inferential process closely connected to the mechanism of brain. It involves the language code, but more important, translation relies on the dynamic inference based on the dynamic context, that is relevance. As translation is communication, relevance is also the basis to the understanding of the source language and the choice for code in translating process. To some extent, the interpretation to translation under Relevance theory avoids the arguments on translation principles in the field of translation.The thesis is to explore how metaphor is understood within the framework of Relevance theory. It gives the definitions of metaphor from different perspectives of traditional rhetorical view, cognitive view, and pragmatic view, etc.; it also takes a general historical survey of some classical metaphor studies abroad and some present metaphor research at home. And the thesis gives a brief introduction to Relevance theory from four points: relevance, context, contextual effects and ostensive-inferential communication, by which some motivations of Relevance theory's explanation for metaphors are explored. Then after the introduction to some"equivalence"principles in translation theories, it is the essence of the relevant translation theory. The author tries to study the metaphor translation under the relevant translation theory; with case study on metaphors in Chinese classical poetry, three ways to practical translation are proposed with explanations on detailed metaphor cases. In the end of the thesis, there is a follow-up thinking about Relevance theory's explanation for metaphor, which mainly refers to some existing problems in practical application.