从关联理论的角度看翻译中的语境问题

从关联理论的角度看翻译中的语境问题
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 Relevance 2.1. 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 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. 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, aren’t 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: let’s not talk about the hostess here and now.
2.3. Principle of relevance and optimal relevance The 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
hearer’s cognitive environment, intellectual and se nsibility, 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 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. [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 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. [8] In 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.” [9]
People 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 theory
3.1. 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. And a text is not isolated, for it always stays in a relevant language environment that we name it “context”. Context is very important to translation. Generally speaking, text exists within context and context always accompanies text. It is the context that makes the text come to life.
Now that context plays so important a role in translation, before further the discussion, the most important thing is to make clear a question: what is 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, personalit y, creation etc.” [10] These are the dictionary meanings of context, and 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. [11] Although people have not yet come to agreement on using the term “context”, all the people k now the importance of context in understanding the text, especially in translation. Many translators realize that one should never understand a
single word without considering its context. Here is a simple illustration may make the point clear.
(4) “Out in the west where men are men”. These two “men” will definitely puzzle many people if the background or the situation of this phrase used is not clear. And if people do not know that this “west” refer to the western part of the United States, they will not be able to know that the second “men” refer to Chinese word “男子汉” as well as “cowboys” who are a sort of men working on horse back, employed to look after cattle in the Western part of the United States. 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. Classifications of context
Traditionally, people classify context in different perspectives. Some just simply classify it as linguistic context or non-linguistic context. Linguistic context is always relevant to the phonology, lexicology, grammar, semantics, pragmatics, rhetoric, logic, discourses etc. And non-linguistic context always consists of social environment (including culture, customs, social background, etc) and natural environment (including time, place, audience, etc).
Linguists Duranti and Goodwin suggest that context consists of text, situation, behavior environment, and immediate background knowledge. Text refers to phrase context, sentence context and discourse context that are closely related to linguistic factors. Situation refers to “space and framework of language communication”, which is also called situational context. Utterance features refer to the code of communicators. [12] In bi-linguistic and
multi-linguistic society, people intentionally transfer language codes to achieve their purpose
of communication. Gumperz gives utterance features another name, which is conceptualization cues, including stress, intonation, rhythm, smile, habitual expressions and so on. Behavior environment refers to the gestures and body languages that communicators use to express their meanings and feelings. Immediate background knowledge refers to encyclopedic knowledge, accidents and the usage of background knowledge. [13]
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 ②situation context and text ③objective context and subjective context ④implicit context and explicit context ⑤actual context and invented context ⑥verbal context and non-verbal context. [14]
In a broad sense, context refers to the whole natural, social and cultural background that relevant to communication, and it is the “big
context”; in a narrow sense, context is the “small context” which refers to linguistic context, including words, sentences, paragraphs, discourses and grammars. Situation context means real situation that linguistic activities happen in, including communicators, time, place, topic, medium, the formality of communication and so on. Subjective context refers to communicators’ subjective factors, such as personality, interest, feeling and mood; objective context refers to the objective existence in the objective world, which is made of the place and time of communication, and various complicated social and cultural environment. Explicit context is the linguistic and
non-linguistic environment that obviously shows in the communication, including time, place, audience style etc; implicit context is the hidden meaning and encyclopedic knowledge that is related to but hidden from the real situation. Actual context is the real environment of communication, while invented context is the
fabricated environment that always appears in fictions and poems. Verbal context is the context that expresses in language, and non-verbal context always refers to gestures and body languages.
From the above classifications, one can easily find that different classifications have many similarities and overlaps. Both of these classifications are reasonable in some aspects, but imperfect in some other aspects, so we cannot say which one is better than another. 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 developing communication any more. People need to discuss context in a new perspective.
3.3. Discussion on context in the perspective of pragmatics and relevance
3.3.1. Static context and dynamic context
As what is discussed above, the traditional views of context are static and fixed. But the static study on context cannot meet the need of dynamic communication process. According to Thomas, meaning is not fixed only decided by words, and the speaker alone also does not arouse it; meaning is dynamic and it depends on the negotiation of communicators. And she consid ered the pragmatics as “the study of interactive meaning”. In her view, context is dynamic and changing all the time according to all the factors relevant to communication. [15] Most of the contextual factors are developing, and all the developing factors would probably become the elements of context.
As we all know, there are many components forming the context, and these contextual components are “the pool of shared knowledge”, which are very important to understand the utterance or text. 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. ”. [16] Commonly, people regard the linguistic communication as a r process of circular, which all the participators play the roles of speaker and hearer alternatively. But Frank Dance suggested that the process of communication is a process of twisting ascendance, and the linguistic communication is a continuously developing process. [17] Every success in information and meaning transformation means that the communication would be up to a new height. Otherwise, if a participator does not understand or misunderstand of the other participator’s intentional meaning, the communication would be blocked or drawn back. 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.
In the perspective of pragmatics, “static context is by no means unimportant, but we attachémore importance to dynamic context, because communication is based on interactive meaning generation and interpretation on the one hand, and on dynamic negotiation and interpretation of context on the other, and all communication starts from a certain relevant given context, and following the ostensive-inference model, dynamically and effectively arrives at the invisible implicit premise and implicit conclusion.” [18] Actually, the process of understanding an utterance or a text is a process of context proposition and selection. The hearer should select some relevant contextual
components to form a communication environment within limited time, so that one can understand the utterance or text more quickly and effectively.
Under the framework of dynamic context, context is not statically seen as the pool of shared knowledge relating to an utterance, but 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.
3.3.2. Cognitive context
In the perspective of relevance theory, context is a psychological concept: “A context is a
psychological construct, a subset of the hearer’s assumptions about the world.” [19] So in relevance theory, context does not refer to some part of external environment of the communicators, be it preceding or following an utterance, situational circumstances, cultural factors, natural and social environment, etc; it rather 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. [20] 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 t wo sources.” [21] Since any of this information could serve as the potential context, the most important question for a successful communication is: 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 examples: (5). A: Do you like rugby?
B: I am a New Zealander.
In this example, A asks a simple question that just need the hearer give an answer of “yes” or “no”. But B gives a confu sing and irrelevant answer so that A cannot understand immediately. So A needs some efforts to guess or reason the actual meaning of B. After a series of assumptions and retrieves in the memory, A may get information: Rugby is a very popular
game in New Zealand; almost every New Zealander likes this game. Up until then, A probably knows the actual meaning of B: “Of course I like rugby.”
(6) 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. Of course, A would feel puzzled: “what is the meaning of B? Does he want coffee or not?” At this time, A should 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 examples show, a same sentence。