the Context in Translation

the Context in Translation:

from the Perspective of Relevance Theory

Abstract : Translation as a communicative activity, has a close relationship with context. And context also play a vital and positive role in translation studies. Based on the Relevance Theory put forward by Sperber and Wilson(1986) ,This thesis aims to explore the effect of context to translation, which will be helpful for it provides a new view to study and practice translation.

Keywords: translation; context; relevance theory; optimal relevance ; cognitive context; dynamic context

1. Introduction

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. 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

Relevance Theory is first put forward by Linguists Sperber and Wilson 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 suggests 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 which 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. So 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 one's attention to make manifest a basic layer of information', this basic layer of information being the communicator's informative intention. '[2]

2.2 Relevance and degree of relevance

In communication, the same sentence always has different understandings under different conditions which 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 do not realize these factors or cannot immediately relate these factors to the certain utterance, so people cannot understand the real meaning of a sentence 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. Sperber and Wilson introduce and 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]

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.

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, aren't they?

In this case, B gives a completely irrelevant answer to A. 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: let's not talk about the hostess here and now.

2.3. Principle of relevance and optimal relevance

linguistic communication is relevance-oriented, and 'cost' and 'benefit' are two important factors in this process. However, whether an utterance has adequate relevance, many factors such as the expression styles of an utterance, the hearer's 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. '[4] During the process of the ostensive communication, both communicators try their best to look for the optimal relevance of the speaker's utterance and the hearer's 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 addressee's effort to process it.

(b) The ostensive stimulus is the most relevant one compatible with the communicator's abilities and preferences. [5]

'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. '[6]

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 hearer's 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. [7] 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. '[8]

in all, 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.

3. Discussion on context in the perspective of the relevance theory

3.1. definition of context

In English, 'context' originated from the Latin word 'contextus', which means,' a joining together '. According to the Webster's New World Dictionary of the American Language, context means' the parts of a sentence, paragraph, discourse etc, immediately next to or surrounding a specified word or passage and determining its exact meaning.' It also refers to 'the whole situation, background, or environment relevant to a particular event, personality, creation etc.' [9] on the basis of them, many linguists and translation scholars developed their own definition of context. Some simply use the word 'context'; some prefer the term 'situational context', 'context of situation', and some others propose such terms as 'context of culture', 'context of utterance'. Besides, quite a few persons choose the word 'environment' and propose some terms like the following: language environment, pragmatic environment, social environment, natural environment etc. Up until now, the meaning of context is extended to a large scale, but no clear definitions have been given to. [10]

In a word, context is a systematic construct consisting of linguistic and non-linguistic factors determining the understanding and interpretation of text. Furthermore, both linguistic and non-linguistic context are composed of various kinds of contextual factors, such as language systems, geographical factors , social backgrounds and Culture differences etc.

3.2 Discussion on context in the perspective of the relevance theory

3.2.1 Static context and dynamic context

Traditionally, people classify context in different perspectives Some just simply classify it as linguistic context or non-linguistic context. Linguists Duranti and Goodwin suggest that context consists of text, situation, behavior environment, and immediate background knowledge. On the basis of precious classification, Chen Zhi'ang and Wenxu made a good conclusion. They classified context as follows: ① broad-sensed context and narrow-sensed context ② situation context and text ③ objective context and subjective context ④ implicit context and explicit context ⑤ actual context and invented context ⑥ verbal context and non-verbal context. [11] But all of these interpretations of context are static and fixed, and all of the contextual components are regarded as static, fixed and isolated. As the deepening of the context study, as the combination of the context study and communication study, traditional and static context study cannot meet the needs of dynamic communication process. People need to discuss context in a new perspective.

Later on, Thomas holds that context is dynamic and changing all the time according to all the factors relevant to communication. [12] Most of the contextual factors are developing, and all the developing factors would probably become the elements of context. But not all the contextual components can be seen as context, only those closely relate to the current communication can form the context. Professor Liu Huanhui pointed out that all the probable contextual components,

objective or subjective, would not form the context if they lose the relevance to the linguistic communication. '. [13] and Frank Dance suggested that the process of communication is a process of twisting ascendance, and the linguistic communication is a continuously developing process. [14] In another word, the linguistic communication is dynamic, the precious information is the foreword of the latter information, and then the latter information becomes the foreword of the next latter information. In this way, the context is changing as the communication is developing. Hence , context is a dynamic concept as well as communication.

Thus under the framework of dynamic context, context is seen as a continuously developing process, which reflects the dynamic relations between communicators and environment. On one hand, the communicators should be restricted by context, that is, an utterance is meaningful only if it can adjust to a certain context. On the other hand, the communicators can intentionally manipulate the contextual components to form a context that is beneficial to their linguistic communication. In other words, the communicators are not only controlled by context, they also control text.

3.2.2. Cognitive context

In the perspective of relevance theory, context is also a psychological concept: 'A context is a psychological construct, a subset of the hearer's assumptions about the world.' [15] So in relevance theory, context refers to part of their 'assumptions about the world' or cognitive environment, as it is called. So the cognitive context

discusses context in the perspective of relevance theory and under the framework of cognition. The notion of 'cognitive context' takes into account the various external factors but places the emphasis on the information they provided and its mental availability for the interpretation process. [16 ] According to Sperber and Wilson, 'the cognitive context of a person comprises a potentially huge amount of very varied information. It includes information that can be perceived in the physical environment, information that can be retrieved from memory ---- in itself a vast store of information, including information deriving from preceding utterances plus any cultural or any other knowledge stored there ---- and furthermore information that can be inferred from those two sources. '[17] but how the hearers or translators manage to select the actual, speaker-intended assumptions from among all the assumptions they could use form their environment? Look at the following example:

A: Would you like some coffee?

B: Coffee would keep me awake.

In this case, A wants to offer B a coffee, so A asks the question hoping to get a definite answer. However, B does not give A an obvious answer, but gives an irrelevant answer to A's question. At this time, A would guess and reason the actual meaning of B according to some contextual components, such as time, place, situation, character and mood of B, the relations of A and B, etc. If B is very tired and wanting to sleep well at night, then the intended meaning of B is: 'No, thanks!' If B has a lot of work to do and need to stay up all night, then the intended

meaning of B is: 'Yes, please!'

As the above example show, a same sentence has many different understandings and meanings. And Sperber and Wilson also hold the opinion that any utterances have different meaning in different situation; the speaker should express the crucial emphasis by the way of ostensive inference, guiding the hearer to reason the actual context in the correct direction.

human beings like to internalize the external environment, and their own Experience to form a cognitive context established during the process of understanding by continuous selection, which is helpful for their understanding of the utterance or text. The process of processing and selecting the optimal context is a process of looking for the optimal relevance of utterance and context. In relevance theory, cognitive context is developing and dynamic. In order to give a relevant interpretation to an utterance, people have to add some more relevant assumptions to context. that is to say,'To be communicatively competent , one should also be capable of actively manipulating aspects of context to advance his or her communicative goals and effectively interpret meaning by creating an appropriate context for the interpretation procedure.'[18] To sum up, in the perspective of relevance theory, the context in communication is dynamic, and the key of utterance understanding is to look for relevance in the cognitive context.

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