从关联理论的角度看翻译中的语境问题英语学专业.docx

从关联理论的角度看翻译中的语境问题 [Abstract] Sperber and Wilson first put forward the Relevance Theory, which explains linguistic activities in the framework of cognition. Their student Ernst-August Gutt applied it to translation studies and got an encouraging result. He pointed out that translation is not only a communicative activity, but also a cognitive activity. Context plays a very important role in our understanding of the utterance and text. A successful translation requires the translator to reason according to the dynamic context, which depends so much on the relevance of the language and environment. In fact, the process of translation is a process of context reasoning and selecting, which is always dynamic and developing as the circumstances change. During the process of translation, the main task of translator is to find out the relevance, especially the optimal relevance between the language and context. According to the principle of the optimal relevance, the translator could understand the original text correctly, and then translate it into target language appropriately by composing and reasoning the most suitable context. Discussing on context in the perspective of relevance theory provides a new view to study and practice translation. [Key Words] Translation; communication; relevance theory; optimal relevance; cognitive context; dynamic context 【摘 要】关联理论是由Sperber and Wilson 最早提出的，它从认知的角度解释了许多的语言活动。随后，Wilson的学生Gutt 最早把这一理论运用于翻译研究中，并取得突破性的进展。他还指出，翻译不仅仅是一项交际活动，更是一项认知活动。在我们理解一段话语或文字的时候，语境往往起着非常重要的作用。成功的翻译往往要求翻译者能够根据动态语境进行推理，而动态语境又依赖于语言与环境的关联。实际上，翻译的过程就是一个语境推理和选择的动态的，不断发展的过程。因此，在翻译的过程中，译者的主要任务就是找出语言与语境之间的关联，特别是最佳关联。根据最佳关联理论，翻译者就能通过构建最适合的语境，准确地理解源语文章，并且比较贴切地把它翻译成目的语。因此，从语用关联的角度探讨语境问题为我们的翻译研究和翻译实践提供了一个全新的视角。 【关键词】翻译；交际活动；关联理论；最佳关联；认知语境；动态语境 1. Introduction Translation is not only a linguistic activity that transforms the meaning from one language to another with words as its medium, but also a complicated thinking activity that contains many linguistic and non-linguistic components. So many problems on translation may not be solved by the only linguistic approach. After the birth of pragmatics, many translation scholars applied it into the research of translation studies and got some encouraging results. Because pragmatics studies focus on the relations between language and context, the pragmatic approach of translation emphasizes on the relations between text and context. In this way, pragmatics provides us a new and beneficial view to study translation. The British linguists Malinowski originally put forward the word “context” in 1920s. From then on, many linguists elaborated context from many different perspectives and they had a consensus that context is very important to understand the utterance and text. Though many linguists and translation scholars had known the importance of context and had put much effort into context studies, the traditional context studies regard context as a static, isolated and fixed situation. According to many linguists and translators, translation is a very special kind of communication that does not always happen among people face to face, and it depends much on the context. Understanding the semantic meaning of a text is not sufficient, comprehending the contextual meaning is also very important for good translation. Communication is a continuous and dynamic process of changes and development, and so is context. Translators do not engage in the mere translation of words; do not translate according to those static and fixed contextual elements, their interpretive acts deal with reasoning and exploration of situations that are constituted by an intense interaction of linguistic, psychological, anthropological, and cultural phenomena. [1] In this way, a dynamic context that depends so much on the relevance of the language and environment is established in the process of translating. So during the process of translation, the main task of translator is to find out the relevance, especially the optimal relevance between the language and context. 2.  Relevance Theory and Optimal Relevance 2.1. Relevance Theory Linguists Sperber and Wilson first put forward the Relevance Theory in the famous linguistic work “Relevance: Communication and Cognition”, which explains linguistic activities in the framework of cognition. In the Relevance Theory, the communication including verbal and non-verbal communicative activities is regarded as a cognitive activity, and its success depends on the consensus towards in cognitive environment between both sides of communication. The cognitive environment always includes lexical meaning, encyclopedic knowledge and logical information. To have a successful communication, the search for the consensus and relevance is the most important. According to this consensus and the relevance, people can understand the intention and purpose of the speaker or the author easily. Sperber and Wilson also suggested that the understanding of the utterance