On Translating Culture-specific Public Materials From C-E-A Relevance Theory Perspective

With the furthering of the Chinese reform and opening-up, public materials translated from Chinese to English, serving as an essential way to publicize the overall image of China, can be seen everywhere; but the quality is by no means satisfactory because most of the materials are just translated verbatim, with total disregard of the acceptability of the target readers. The translation of public materials from C-E—indispensable to China's foreign economic and cultural development—has hardly any clear principles to follow. This thesis is a study on translating culture-specific public materials from C-E from a relevance theory perspective.This thesis sets out with a rough sketch of the relevance-theoretic framework. Formally proclaimed by Sperber & Wilson, relevance theory takes communication as an ostensive-inferential process, and the crucial mental faculty that enables people to communicate with one another is the ability to draw inference from people's behaviour. They claim that relevance is dependent on the interplay of two factors: contextual effects and processing effort."The central claim of relevance theory is that human communication crucially creates an expectation of optimal relevance, that is, an expectation on the part of the hearer that his attempt at interpretation will yield adequate contextual effects at minimal processing cost"(Gutt 2004: 32).Then this thesis shows us an account of its implication for translation as identified by Gutt. The application of relevance theory entails that translation is being looked as a part of communication. To ensure successful communication, the translator implicitly and automatically conveys the assumption that the reader can expect to derive adequate contextual effects without spending unnecessary effort. The conditions of optimal relevance seem to provide the guidance that translators have been looking for.After presenting a unified account of the translation of public materials from C-E, this thesis puts forward a suggestion that in the process of such kind of translation, the translator can always rely on the guidance provided by the search for optional relevance. Firstly, he should make the translated version adequately relevant to the reader—that is, it offers adequate contextual effects; Secondly, it should be expressed in such a manner that it yields the intended interpretation of the translation without putting the reader to unnecessary processing effort.To apply optimal relevance to practice, the translator has to study culture gaps between China and western countries. He can take into consideration customs, values and the way of thinking of these two cultures, familiarize himself with the contextual background knowledge of the reader, and bridge the gaps by way of amplification, omission, editing or restructuring for the reader to derive information that is adequately relevant to him with minimal processing effort.The study on translating culture-specific public materials from C-E in light of optimal relevance is of great significance. It provides a theoretic principle for the translator to follow, affording an access to help him improve the quality of his works to meet the reader's expectations.