A Research On The English-Chinese Translation Of Business Documents From Relevance Theory Perspective

As economic globalization intensifies and international transactions among countries become increasingly frequent than ever before,business documents like business contracts have been becoming increasingly important.Compared with texts of other genres,business documents possess characteristics of their own.Business documents tend to use archaic words,couplet words,loan words and technical terms at lexical level,and to adopt long complex sentences as well as sentences in present tense and future tense to clarify terms and conditions,responsibilities and obligations of the parties under a contract at syntactic level.The present thesis took the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods(1980)and a series of business contracts as its subject for research,and was intended to explore the potential approaches to decoding the articles and provisions in the Convention and business contracts,as well as the strategies for translating business documents from the perspective of relevance theory.Relevance theory views translation as an instance of communication.Translation depends largely on the accessibility to the contextual assumptions of original text(i.e.,interpretive adequacy),and on translator's ability to draw inferences from the original text(i.e.,reader's accessibility).Contextual comprehension is a cognitive process involving both ostensive inference process and reasoning process.The listener acquires the communicative intention of the speaker based on the speaker's schematic behavior and the contextual hypothesis.Viewing from relevance theory,translator shall take into account of the audience's cognitive ability to decode the target text in target language context.The translator shall also make flexible conversion between implicit and ostensive inference so to make the translated version easier to be decoded.In addition,the translator has to make a reasonable decision in whether choosing foreignizing,domesticating,or interpretive translating in accordance with the norms of the target language,so to make the reader to have acquired optimal relevance between the source text and the target text.In the present thesis,the author proposed a series of approaches to the translationof business documents under the principle of optimal relevance and inference: overt translating strategy based on cross-cultural communication;covert translating strategy based on functional consistency;and interpretive translating strategy based on cognitive inferences.