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 inthe framework of cognition.Their student Ernst-August Gutt applied it to translation studies andgot an encouraging result.He pointed out that translation is not only a communicative activity,butalso a cognitive activity.Context plays a very important role in our understanding of the utteranceand text.A successful translation requires the translator to reason according to the dynamiccontext,which depends so much on the relevance of the language and environment.In fact,theprocess of translation is a process of context reasoning and selecting,which is always dynamicand developing as the circumstances change.During the process of translation,the main task oftranslator is to find out the relevance,especially the optimal relevance between the language andcontext.According to the principle of the optimal relevance,the translator could understand theoriginal text correctly,and then translate it into target language appropriately by composing andreasoning the most suitable context.Discussing on context in the perspective of relevance theoryprovides 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，Wilso的学生Gut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.IntroductionTranslation is not only a linguistic activity that transforms the meaning from one language toanother with words as its medium,but also a complicated thinking activity that contains manylinguistic and non-linguistic components.So many problems on translation may not be solved bythe only linguistic approach.After the birth of pragmatics,many translation scholars applied itinto the research of translation studies and got some encouraging results.Because pragmaticsstudies focus on the relations between language and context,the pragmatic approach of translationemphasizes on the relations between text and context.In this way,pragmatics provides us a newand beneficial view to study translationThe British linguists Malinowski originally put forward the word "context"in 1920s.From thenon,many linguists elaborated context from many different perspectives and they had a consensusthat context is very important to understand the utterance and text.Though many linguists andtranslation scholars had known the importance of context and had put much effort into contextstudies,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 communicationthat 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 contextualmeaning is also very important for good translation.Communication is a continuous and dynamicprocess of changes and development,and so is context.Translators do not engage in the meretranslation of words;do not translate according to those static and fixed contextual elements,theirinterpretive acts deal with reasoning and exploration of situations that are constituted by an intenseinteraction 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 isestablished in the process of translating.So during the process of translation,the main task oftranslator is to find out the relevance,especially the optimal relevance between the language andcontext.2.Relevance Theory and Optimal Relevance2.1.Relevance TheoryLinguists Sperber and Wilson first put forward the Relevance Theory in the famous linguisticwork"Relevance:Communication and Cognition",which explains linguistic activities in theframework of cognition.In the Relevance Theory,the communication including verbal andnon-verbal communicative activities is regarded as a cognitive activity,and its success depends onthe consensus towards in cognitive environment between both sides of communication.Thecognitive environment always includes lexical meaning,encyclopedic knowledge and logicalinformation.To have a successful communication.the search for the consensus and relevance isthe most important.According to this consensus and the relevance,people can understand theintention and purpose of the speaker or the author easilySperber and Wilson also suggested that the understanding of the utterance is not only a reasoningprocess,but also a process of ostensive inference.Traditionally,there are two models ofcommunication.One is the coded model that regards language as a code system.And in the codedmodel,the communication is a process of codes transformation.The other one is inferentialcommunication that depends much on the context reasoning.Therefore,to understand theutterance,especially those culture-oriented utterances,simply coding and decoding is far less thanenough.Both of the models only partially explain the communication,but cannot reveal the natureof communication,which is more complicated than just coding and decoding.Sperber and Wilsoncombined these two models,and then advanced the concept of"Ostensive-InferentialCommunication",in which the communication is regarded as an inferential process,and contextinference plays an important role in it."Strictly speaking,relevance theory applied not to allcommunication in the sense of any kind of information transfer,but to 'ostensive communicationor,more explicitly,to 'Ostensive-Inferential Communication':'ostensive-inferentialcommunication consists in making manifest to an audience one's attention to make manifest abasic layer of information',this basic layer of information being the communicator's informativeintention.”[2]2.2.Relevance and degree of relevanceIn communication,the same sentence always has different understandings under differentconditions.These different understandings are not aroused by the word meaning,but by manyother non-verbal factors,such as time,place,social background,status and intention of thespeaker or the author.Usually,people cannot understand these factors,so people cannotunderstand the real meaning of a sentence and many misunderstandings occur.Sometimes,peoplecannot 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 themeaning of an utterance.Thus people introduce the notion of relevance,which Sperber andWilson define in terms of the following conditions:Extent condition 1:an assumption is relevant in a context to the extent that its contextual effects inthis context are large.Extent condition 2:an assumption is relevant in a context to the extent that effort required toprocess it in this context is small.3Thus we see firstly that relevance is dependent on the interplay of two factors:contextual effectsand processing effort,which are crucial factors that make inferential communication possible.Secondly,since both these factors are context-dependent,the notion of"relevance"itself iscontext-dependent,too.Thirdly,relevance is comparative notion----utterances can vary accordingto the degree of relevance they achieve in some context.[4]According to Sperber and Wilson,the degree of relevance depends on the contextual effects andprocessing effort.However,the contextual effects cannot be achieved easily.Even if people put ina lot of processing effort,they may not achieve the sufficient contextual effects.The achievementof contextual effects always depends on the following factors:the complexity of an utterance,theexplication of the context and processing effort that are made to reason the contextual effects.Inthe framework of relevance not all the contextual implications of a given proposition can be easyto obtain.Those derived from small,easily accessible contexts will be relatively cheap inprocessing terms.Those derived from large,less easily accessible contexts will be relativelyexpensive in processing terms,because of the additional effort required to put into reasoning andselecting the most suitable context to the certain context.So the universal aim in contextprocessing is to obtain the maximum of contextual implication in return for any processing effortexpended.But relevance is a comparative concept,for it contrasts with the context and depends on thecontext;and also it is decided by the communicators'cognitive capacity and environment,so thedegree of relevance can be classified as maximally relevant,very relevant,weakly relevant andirrelevant.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 relevanceis the strongest,so we can say that the dialogue has a very clear context,and need little processingefforts.And the utterance and context are maximally relevant.