On Politeness Equivalence From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Politeness is a social and culture phenomenon. As a crucial paradigm in social life, politeness provides restrains for human behaviors and harmonizes interpersonal relationship. Due to cultural differences, people from different cultural communities have different interpretations of politeness. One cultural politeness may not be understood by the people from other cultures. Translation is a kind of cross culture communication activity. Whether cross-culture communication is successful or not depends on whether the target text readers have the same interpretation of the politeness implied in the original text from the translated interlocutor's discourses.The traditional views on politeness include Lakoff's Rules of Politeness, Brown and Levinson's Face Theory, Leech's Politeness Principle and Gu's Politeness Maxims. These theories discuss about politeness from different perspectives and partly reveal the nature of politeness. But they have not commented on politeness systematically and persuasively and they can not be used for guiding politeness translation. The prevalent cognitive science in recent years provides a new approach to studying politeness. Relevance theory as a theory to study human's cognition has a great explanatory power over translation.This thesis examines the politeness translation issue from the relevance-theoretical approach. The role of translator lies in sorting out the politeness discourse based on his assumption about the interpersonal meaning of interlocutor to meet English readers'expectation of the original. The author of this thesis holds the view that the realization of politeness in translation is through satisfying reader's expectation and social effects of politeness should prevail in translation. Besides, Relevance Theory is able to accommodate a social dimension and it could be used as a framework to account for politeness translation. This thesis demonstrates that the social effects of politeness-interpersonal meaning entailed in politeness expressions should be conveyed first in the realization of politeness equivalence by a translator.