Intentions, Effects And Context: A Relevance-Theoretic Approach To English Version Of Six Chapters Of A Floating Life

Relevance refers to the kind of psychological impact exerted upon a reader's existing construct of the world, especially felt in the creation of atmosphere in literature. The reader's conceptual impedance mainly results from an inadequate context, in which an utterance can be processed and an assumption can be drawn. Such difficulty may find its root in the differences of cultural backgrounds. Relevance theory regards readers as actively choosing an optimum context for the purpose of information processing, with the ultimate goal of maximum relevance. In such a process, it is imperative that the translator supply the needed background information without which no adequate effect can be made. The bigger the contextual effects, the smaller the processing efforts, the bigger is the relevance, from which readers recover the better preserved commutative intention. Such is the internal relation between intention, context and effects.Recent years have witnessed an explosion of research on translation, most of which focused on the wording, or literary value of the text, without an adequate account of the communicative mechanism and the underlying psychological faculty. A shift of domain from the text product per se to the mental faculty needed for understanding the text has been suggested by linguists lead by Chomsky. It is true that academic areas of interest swing in and out of fashion, but the language faculty assumed by Chomsky have remained the holy grail of linguistic study.This paper explores this fascinating area, with a starting point in people's head, and argues that only with an accurate estimation of reader's inferential capacity can a piece of translation function as originally intended, which is more explained than described in the paper.The strategies and tactics used in the translation of'six chapters of a floating life' are categorized and discussed from a psycholinguistic point of view, applying the relevance theory. The main body is divided into three parts:the writer's communicative intention, the contextual effects achieved in the translation and the chosen of an optimum context on the reader's part respectively, with a special interest invested in the role of translator, who faces the task of creating an acceptable context to maximize relevance, in an effort to re-generate the originally intended meaning.The findings of the research are as follows:1. Being an organic whole, intention, effect and context have limiting forces upon each other. Within the framework of relevance, the full restore of communicative intention constitutes the success of communication, for which the wording of an utterance serves as nothing more than a tool, a piece of evidence for the writer's intended message.2. Relevance is directly proportional to the amount of contextual effects achieved, which could include the implication of a new assumption, the strengthening of previous assumptions and the erasure of wrong ones. The relationship between relevance and required processing efforts, on the other hand, is negative, while the exact efforts needed depend on reader's existing psychological construct, in other words their mental model of the world. Readers'inferential ability also plays a crucial role in literature appreciation.3. Varies strategies could be more properly used when reader's mental faculty is taken into consideration. Translation is more than delivering a message; it crucially involves the rebuilding of the pathway through which readers could recover writer's intention on their own. Balancing effect against effort begins with the provision of an optimum context, where readers have just enough background information to form their own interpretation.