Survey of RT and Translation

涂于德

Survey of RT and Translation

     Gutt, the student of Wilson, published his book, Translation and Relevance: Cognition and Context, in 1991.His viewpoints about translation give us a new insight into translation.
     According to Gutt, the ultimate goal for translation is its optimal relevance to the source text (hereinafter ST). A translator should first of all find out the implicature from the explicature of the ST communicator by means of all the communication clues available at all levels of phonology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics etc, and then by inferring the cognitive environment of the audience he should pick up from the various potential versions the optimally relevant one, which thus can best help the audience infer the image or massage intended by the ST communicator. This rule of optimal relevance is believed to be able to match, to the greatest possible extent, the ST communicator's intention with the target text (hereinafter TT) audience's expectation. It should be known that human communication is not a 100 percent correspondency between input and output, or between verbal production and verbal comprehension due to the differences of cognitive construction and cognitive environment. And the translator is in a secondary communicative environment, constrained by factors such as linguistic and cultural differences. Translation, however, must meet one requirement at least: to guarantee the success of communication. In doing so, a translator often finds himself in a dilemma, unable to keep a TT both in form and meaning of a given ST. Thus, a translator's essential task or responsibility is to achieve communicative efficacy. According to RT discussed above, optimal relevance is dependent on two factors: processing effort and cognitive effect. In the same circumstances, the less the processing effort is made, the more the relevance will be achieved; the bigger the cognitive effect is, the more the relevance will be achieved. There is a potential context in each individual brain, which stores a lot of information. However, it is not all the information that can be drawn out at the same cost of processing effort (Lin Kenan, 1994: 7).