英语论文网

Relevance theory is a cognitive pragmatics theory that emerged in the 1980s. In 1986, French linguist Sperber and British linguist Wilson published their pragmatics work “Relevance: Communication and Cognition”, in which they proposed an important theory of cognitive pragmatics-relevance theory. Relevance theory answers the questions of what is communicated and how to obtain a successful communication, which is of great theoretical and practical significance for cognitive pragmatics itself and other fields.

2.1.1 Relevance and the Principles of Relevance

Human beings are adept at processing information. According to Sperber and Wilson, relevance is a property that makes information worth processing for human beings. Their definition of relevance is that “an assumption is relevant in a context to the extent that its contextual effects in this context are large; an assumption is relevant in a context to the extent that the effort required to process it in this context is small” (Sperber & Wilson, 1995: 133). From the above definition of relevance, we can draw a conclusion that relevance is closely related to cognitive effect and processing effort. The greater the contextual effect is, the less processing effort the audience will make. And the discourse will be more relevant in communication. Human beings always strive to achieve the maximal cognitive effect and the minimal processing effort in utterance. Relevance is a comparative notion-the meaning of an utterance in different contexts might become completely different with the change of the degree of relevance.

2.2 Relevance Theory of Translation

Ernst August Gutt published his book Translation and Relevance: Cognition and Context (2nd ed.) in 1991, and he applied theory to study translation. Gutt (1991) pointed out that translation is a special form of verbal communication between two languages, which is an inferential process closely related to the brain mechanism. Gutt explicitly states that “the success or failure of translation, like other situations in ostensive-inferential communication, depends fundamentally on whether it is consistent with the principle of relevance” (2004: 199). Gutt believes that “seeking the optimal relevance” should be the translator’s guide to translation, which requires the translation produce sufficient contextual effects for the readers with proper processing effort.

2.2.1 Translation as Interlingual Interpretive Use

Gutt believes that translation is an interpretative use of interlanguage, and the core relationship between the source text and the translation is interpretative (Gutt, 2004: 35-36). The principle of relevance can be construed as, based on the interpretive use of translation, “a presumption of optimal resemblance” (Gutt, 2009: 106). Or more specifically, what the communicator means to pass on is a) presumed to interpretively resemble the original-otherwise this would not be an instance of interpretive use b) the resemblance it shows is to be consistent with the presumption of optimal relevance, that is, is presumed to have adequate contextual effects without gratuitous processing eff本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。