A Relevance-Theoretic Account Of Underspecification In The Translation Of The Discourse Marker So

The pragmatic functions of discourse markers and their translations have gained interest from researchers since they are a common issue in the fields of discourse analysis and pragmatics.However,most of the relevant studies focus on Indo-European language pairs,but few of them involve such cross Indo-European and Sino-Tibetan language pairs as English-Chinese pair;some scholars have noticed the phenomenon of underspecification in the translation of discourse markers,but have not thoroughly explored the causes and effects of it.In view of this,based on a self-built EnglishChinese parallel corpus of TED talks,this study investigates underspecification of the discourse marker so in Chinese translation,and attempts to explore the causes and effects from the perspective of relevance theory.Specifically,this study first classified the discourse marker so into six pragmatic functions,i.e.consequence,resuming,closing,opening,specification and addition,among which consequence is regarded as its prototypical function,resuming and closing belong to the sub-prototypical function,and opening,specification and addition belong to the extended function in accordance with prototype theory.Then,this study annotated the translation strategies of the discourse marker so into close pragmatic equivalent,omission,function mismatch,generalization and particularization,among which the latter four belong to underspecification techniques.The self-built corpus contained 506 cases of so as discourse marker in total.The resuming so is the most common,followed by the functions of consequence,addition,specification,and opening,with the closing so appearing last.The functions of opening,specification,and addition,which are followed by resuming and closing,are the most frequently underspecified in the translation of the discourse marker so,with the function of consequence coming in last.It is discovered that the main cause of underspecification is the translators’ inference of the communicators’ intentions.Underspecification is typically permitted because the translator usually reproduces a similar cognitive environment.However,whether the use of functional mismatch is acceptable depends on how similar the pragmatic functions of the source text and the target text are,and the undesirable cases may be due to the lack of professionalism of TED translators.This work has methodological,theoretical,and practical implications.On the theoretical level,this study can serve as a guide for the application of relevance theory in the translation of discourse markers;on the practical level,this study attempts to make recommendations for Chinese translators on how to translate discourse markers;and on the methodological level,this study employs a quantitative corpus-based approach and creates its own TED bilingual parallel corpus to serve as a methodological reference for future research on discourse marker translation.