On The Subjectivity Of The Translators Of Legal Documents From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Due to the distinctiveness of legislative language, the legal translator is almost invisible in legal translation and has been regarded as nothing more than a messenger between the legislator and the law-abiding person for a long time. However, although the legal translator is given less space for his creativity, he plays an important part in the process of legislative text translation as a matter of fact. This paper aims to probe into the subjectivity of the legal translator with the application of relevance theory that can offer a sound explanation to legal translation.Relevance theory, proposed by Sperber and Wilson, belongs to the scope of cognitive pragmatics. Afterwards it was applied to the field of translation studies. Relevance theory assumes translation as a verbal communicative process of ostention and cognitive inference between languages, the key notions of which, such as contextual assumptions, processing efforts, contextual effects, and optimal relevance, highlight the active roles of the translators. Thus, this paper attempts to expound the process of legal translators'cognizing original legislative texts as well as searching and transferring the optimal relevance so as to demonstrate that legal translators should not be neglected in the course of legal translation and they are able to fully exert their subjectivity to promote a successful communication between the original author and the target readers.Through illustrating that legal translators are vital participants in legal translation in the relevance-theoretic framework, this paper, on the one hand contributes to enrich the studies of legal translation theoretically, and on the other hand, it has significant importance to recognize legal translators'subjective status in a new light and encourage legal translators to give full play to their initiative so as to creatively accomplish tasks of legal translation.