Relevance-Theoretic Account For Transference Of Stylistic Value, Cultural Default And Selection Of Translating Strategies In Literary Translation

Relevance theory, initially proposed by Sperber and Wilson to describe cognition in human communication, claims that communication is an ostensive-inferential process. According to relevance theory, the goal of human communication is to achieve optimal relevance—an expectation on the part of the hearer that his endeavors at interpretation will yield adequate contextual effects at minimal processing effort. After assessing and evaluating the audience's cognitive environment and cognitive ability, the communicator conveys his/her communicative intention through utterance. And then the audience decodes and infers the communicator's intention by applying the information of the utterance combined with the contextual assumptions. In the framework of relevance theory, communications fall naturally into two distinct modes of language use: descriptive use and interpretive use. And translation is viewed as a kind of interlingual interpretative use.Although the initial purpose of relevance theory is not to interpret translation, it provides a reasonable and unified theoretical account for translation studies. Ernst-August Gutt first applied relevance theory to translation studies, claiming that translation is a kind of verbal communicative act and is an inferential process connected closely with the mechanism of brain. It not only refers to code, it is also important that the translator should make inference dynamically on the basis of dynamic context in search for relevance, which determines to which degree the translator can understand the source text as well as the selection of information. This view aroused great attention in the field of translation studies both home and abroad. In general we can say that some scholars hold positive attitude towards it while others hold negative attitude.Having analyzed several misunderstandings of relevance theoretic translation studies, this paper attempts to apply relevance theory to literary translation, and points out that three issues in literary translation: transference of stylistic value (aesthetic value), cultural default and selection of translating strategies can all be explained in relevance theoretic framework. According to relevance theory, when ensuring communicative efficacy, a translated text is supposed to converge with the source text; default, especially cultural default, is unavoidable because of human beings' limited cognitive processing abilities and cultural idiosyncrasies of languages; the selection of translating strategies should be guided by searching for optimal relevance for the target reader's benefit.The results of this paper prove that relevance theory can account for literary translation and the criterion of judging translation is the transference of optimal relevance.