A Study Of Translator’s Subjectivity From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

In their co-edited book entitled Relevance: Communication and Cognition(1986), Sperber and Wilson put forward Relevance Theory which attempts to account for communication processes in terms of information-processing faculties of people’s mind. Gutt is the first one who applies Relevance Theory into translation studies. On the basis of “ostensive-inferential mode” formulated by Gutt, the paper aims to explore translator’s subjectivity from two rounds of the ostensive-inferential process, taking a case study of two Chinese versions of Catch-22. In the first round of ostensive-inferential process, translator’s subjectivity manifests itself in three ways: cognition of the original text, the speculation of the dynamic context and the process of searching for optimal relevance. In terms of translators’ cognition of the original text, they give full play to the role of subject by decoding the original text, explaining the implicatures in the original text and inferring the original writer’s intention. However, each individual has different environment due to different perceptual and inferential abilities. Thus, different translators may have different understanding about the same word. According to Relevance Theory, the cognitive context isn’t pre-determined before discourse understanding. Besides, the contextual effects could be divided into three types: contextual implications, strengthenings, and contradictions resulting in the erasure of premises from the context. In the aspect of translators’ speculation of the dynamic context, their subjectivity is manifested by perceptively observing the context is changeable and reproducing the dynamic context in the target text. In terms of pursuing optimal relevance, translators display their subjectivity to find the optimal relevance between context and utterances in the original text. In the second round of ostensive-inferential process, it touches upon not only the transfer of optimal relevance but also the manipulation of target readers’ cognitive environment, which reflects translator’s subjectivity well. Optimal relevance suggests interpretation should enable target readers to get optimal contextual effects at minimal processing effort. Catch-22 is the representative of Black Humor. So, it is feasible enough to evaluate whether two Chinese versions of Catch-22 convey the humor contextual effects according to the principle of optimal relevance. Among the second stage, the author makes a comparative study of the two Chinese versions from four aspects: the translation of phonetic communicative clues, semantic communicative clues, syntactic communicative clues and stylistic communicative clues. The purpose of comparison is to evaluate translator’s subjectivity in terms of the optimal relevance and prove the preservations of these clues could offer great help in reproducing the writing style of the original text.Through the analysis, it is not difficult to draw the conclusions as follows. In the first place, Relevance Theory contributes a lot to unveiling translators’ important status and provides more overall explanation in terms of what role translators are on in translation. Secondly, people could measure whether translators transfer the writing style of the original text from the perspective of optimal relevance. Thirdly, there are some factors affecting translator’s subjectivity, which are characteristics of the original text, cultural differences, translators’ understanding of the original text and target readers’ cognitive environment. In view of these factors, some suggestions have been proposed to help translators do well in achieving optimal relevance: the translation of black humor fictions should start with translators’ complete familiarization of the original text, including its structure and narrative technique. What’s more, adequate translator strategies should be adopted to reduce the side-effects exerted from cultural differences. Last but not least, translators are called upon to improve their all-round abilities, especially the comprehension ability.