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The first introduction of Relevance Theory in China was made by Shen Jiaxuan and He Ziran in 1988 with the paper On the Relevance between Information Transmission and Cognition. In 1991, Gui Shichun used Relevance Theory to make an explanation of psychological problems in learning a language in Cognition and Language. He proposed that communication was considered as an ostensive-inferential process on the basis of the theory of Sperber and Wilson aiming to get the optimal relevance through selecting the most adequate cognitive environment. The paper On Relevance Theory written by Zhang Yafei in 1992, also pointed out his view that language communication was a cognitive process.
Nowadays, Relevance Theory catches more Chinese scholar’s eyes, and is widely applied in many fields, such as English teaching, literature study, and cognitive-communicative viewpoint and so on.
2.2 Related Studies on the Application of Relevance Theory into Translation
In the paper with the title Conginition and Relevance, introducing Relevance Theory into translation was first made by Ernst-August Gutt(1991), the student of Wilson. According to Gutt, faithfulness in translation can be defined exactly by Relevance Theory. Coordinating the effort of both the target language reader and the writer in their pursuit of optimal relevance is what a translator should do. Other scholars like Unger(1998), Olsen(1992), Hjort-Pederson(1996) also did research into Relevance Theory, but Gutt’s contributions are the greatest for coming up with the concept of relevance-theoretic translation.
Relevance-theoretic translation then renovated the traditional thoughts and stereotype about translation and established a new macro-theoretical framework about translation with strong explanatory power on the nature of translation and instructive significance. Scholar such as Dolitsky(1992) and Hymes(1992) also specified the value of Relevance Theory to translation. Relevance Theory has made significant influence in the west both in linguistics and translation fields.
As a matter of fact, the level of studies on Relevance Theory rose to another stage, as early as in 1994, from the publishing of an article Relevance and Translation written by Lin Kenan. In 1997 and 2001, He Ziran organized two seminars on Relevance Theory in Guangzhou and published Pragmatics and English learning in 1997 which clarified the relation between Relevance Theory and translation and made far-reaching influence in domestic. Ye Miao (1998) made an assertion that the significance of Relevance Theory is its emphasis on the translation procedures, that is, upon the search for optimal relevance. Besides, in 2003, Song Xu and Yang Zijian stated that the inferential mode for the translator’s understanding of the original text and proposed two key elements in the translating process. The one is the correspondence of relevance levels and the other is the degrees of relevance.
On the China National Knowledge Internet, more than 415 thousand articles can be found about Relevance Theory, which shows the influence of Relevance Theory on the translation in China nowadays. At present, Relevance Theory is widely known and used in translation fields. Zhao Yanchun(1999) once said that Relevance Theory had the most powerful explanatory power to translation. Although many scholars confirm the significance of Relevance Theory to translation, many problems have showed up during the deep studies. For instance, Gutt’s argument that “Relevance Theory alone is adequate and there seems to be no need for a distinct general translation theory.” has been a hot topic among the scholars and most of them hold different opinions. Therefore, for making the best translation, analyzing its limitations is very important as well. Seeking the optimal relevance is the primary problem. There are a thousand Hamlets in a thousand people’s eyes, the relevance between literature and different readers are different. The failure of oral interpretation can be remedied in the next round because of the consecutiveness of dialogue, but it is hard to correct the mistake