从关联理论的角度看翻译中的语境问题.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 Relevance2.1. 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 is not only a reasoning process, but also a process of ostensive inference. Traditionally, there are two models of communication. One is the coded model that regards language as a code system. And in the coded model, the communication is a process of codes transformation. The other one is inferential communication that depends much on the context reasoning. Therefore, to understand the utterance, especially those culture-oriented utterances, simply coding and decoding is far less than enough. Both of the models only partially explain the communication, but cannot reveal the nature of communication, which is more complicated than just coding and decoding. Sperber and Wilson combined these two models, and then advanced the concept of “Ostensive-Inferential Communication”, in which the communication is regarded as an inferential process, and context inference plays an important role in it. “Strictly speaking, relevance theory applied not to all communication in the sense of any kind of information transfer, but to ostensive communication or, more explicitly, to Ostensive-Inferential Communication: ostensive-inferential communication consists in making manifest to an audience ones attention to make manifest a basic layer of information, this basic layer of information being the communicators informative intention.” 2 2.2. Relevance and degree of relevanceIn communication, the same sentence always has different understandings under different conditions. These different understandings are not aroused by the word meaning, but by many other non-verbal factors, such as time, place, social background, status and intention of the speaker or the author. Usually, people cannot understand these factors, so people cannot understand the real meaning of a sentence and many misunderstandings occur. Sometimes, people cannot immediately relate these factors to the certain utterance and the communication is blocked. So people need to know how the two relate to each other and how to reason and understand the meaning of an utterance. Thus people introduce the notion of relevance, which Sperber and Wilson define in terms of the following conditions:Extent condition 1: an assumption is relevant in a context to the extent that its contextual effects in this context are large. Extent condition 2: an assumption is relevant in a context to the extent that effort required to process it in this context is small. 3 Thus we see firstly that relevance is dependent on the interplay of two factors: contextual effects and processing effort, which are crucial factors that make inferential communication possible. Secondly, since both these factors are context-dependent, the notion of “relevance” itself is context-dependent, too. Thirdly, relevance is comparative notion-utterances can vary according to the degree of relevance they achieve in some context. 4 According to Sperber and Wilson, the degree of relevance depends on the contextual effects and processing effort. However, the contextual effects cannot be achieved easily. Even if people put in a lot of processing effort, they may not achieve the sufficient contextual effects. The achievement of contextual effects always depends on the following factors: the complexity of an utterance, the explication of the context and processing effort that are made to reason the contextual effects. In the framework of relevance not all the contextual implications of a given proposition can be easy to obtain. Those derived from small, easily accessible contexts will be relatively cheap in processing terms. Those derived from large, less easily accessible contexts will be relatively expensive in processing terms, because of the additional effort required to put into reasoning and selecting the most suitable context to the certain context. So the universal aim in context processing is to obtain the maximum of contextual implication in return for any processing effort expended. But relevance is a comparative concept, for it contrasts with the context and depends on the context; and also it is decided by the communicators cognitive capacity and environment, so the degree of relevance can be classified as maximally relevant, very relevant, weakly relevant and irrelevant. Look at the following examples:(1)  A: How long did the conference last?B: Two hours.In this dialogue, the contextual effect is maximal, the processing efforts are minimal, the relevance is the strongest, so we can say that the dialogue has a very clear context, and need little processing efforts. And the utterance and context are maximally relevant.(2)  A: I am out of petrol.B: There is a garage around the corner.In the dialogue above, sentence A actually means, “Where can I buy petrol?” And sentence B means that “You can buy petrol in the garage”. In this case, sentence A and B seems irrelevant, but “we can buy petrol in the garage” is a common sense that everybody knows it. We still can understand the utterance, but it needs hearers more processing efforts than the first example. So it is still a very relevant utterance.(3)  A: The hostess is an awful bore. Do you think so?B: The roses are lovely, arent they?In this case, B gives a completely irrelevant answer to A, and gives no information about question. The answer seems irrelevant semantically, while it has relevance pragmatically. In this time, to obtain certain contextual effects, lots of processing efforts needed, and then the utterance will have a special conversation meaning: lets not talk about the hostess here and now.2.3. Principle of relevance and optimal relevanceThe linguistic communication is relevance-oriented, and “cost” and “benefit” are two important factors in this process. All of the “cost” and “benefit” of both communicators are all taken into account. However, whether an utterance has adequate relevance, many factors such as the expression styles of an utterance, the hearers cognitive environment, intellectual and sensibility, should be taken into account. “The different degrees of accessibility of contextual assumptions make themselves felt by the amount of effort their retrieval requires in a particular act of communication. This sensibility to processing effort is one of the crucial factors that make inferential communication possible: it seems that communication, no doubt like many other human activities, is determined by the desire of optimization of resources, and one aim of optimization is to keep the effort spent to a minimum.” 5 During the process of the ostensive communication, both communicators try their best to look for the optimal relevance of the speakers utterance and the hearers cognitive environment, trying to make successful communication. But what is the optimal relevance? And Sperber and Wilson defined “the presumption of optimal relevance” as follows:(a) The ostensive stimulus is the most relevant enough for it to be worth the addressees effort to process it.(b) The ostensive stimulus is the most relevant one compatible with the communicators abilities and preferences. 6 “The central claim of relevance theory is that human communication crucially creates an expectation of optimal relevance, that is, an expectation on the part of the hearer that his attempt at interpretation will yield adequate contextual effects at minimal processing cost. This fact is believed to be part of your human psychology, and is expressed in relevance theory as the principle of relevance: Every act of ostensive communication communicates the presumption of its own optimal relevance.” 7 Otherwise, not all the ostensive stimulus can obtain the optimal relevance. If and only if an utterance achieves enough contextual effect that can attract the hearers attention, and if and only if an utterance makes the hearer need no gratuitous mental effort, the optimal relevance can be obtained. That is, to obtain the optimal relevance, the speaker implicitly and automatically conveys the assumption that the hearer can expect to derive adequate contextual effects without spending unnecessary efforts. 8In the search for adequate contextual effects, the hearer will also assume that it is not being put to any gratuitous expenditure of processing effort. And it offers the answer to the question: how does a hearer manage to select the right set of contextual assumptions from all he knows? “In the pursuit of optimal relevance it turns first to highly accessible information, looking for adequate contextual effects; if this information does yield contextual effects adequate to the occasion in a way the speaker could foreseen, then it will assume that it has used the right, that is, speaker-intended, contextual information.” 9People cannot give the relevance a clear definition. When people definite the relevance, they not only should think about contextual effects, but also should think about the processing effort that the hearers have put into. That is, the relevance is the result of the interplays of the contextual effects and processing efforts. In other words, if the processing effort is minimal while the contextual effects are maximal, the utterance has the optimal relevance and vise visa. The relevance theory is based on the economical principle. During the process of the communication, people always hope that they can obtain as much contextual effect as possible with as little processing effort as possible.3. Discussion on context in the perspective of the relevance theory3.1. Importance and definitions of context  Translation is the replacement of contextual meanings in one language by the equivalent meanings in another language. Unlike other kinds of communicative activities, translation bases on the texts, which is quite different from conversations. In translation, the word “text” is used to refer to an article, or the main body of a book, which refers to the original text or the translated text.