A Relevance Theory Perspective on Translating the Implicit Information in Literary Texts

Abstract

As one type of cross-cultural communication, the literary translation is more difficult for the translator as he has to deal with a large chunk of implicit information. The implicit information has as its characteristics, such as graded communicability, context-dependence, the correlation among the implicit information, text and context, etc. These characteristics restrict the communicability of the literary texts in another context, so the translator of the literary texts often finds more difficulties in translating. Encouraged by Gutt’s theory and his recent findings, this article adopts a relevance-theory approach and attempts to present a cognitive study of the implicit information in literary texts. It experiments with building an explanatory framework for translating the implicit information in literary texts. The framework is based on a new notion: translation is clues-based interpretive use of language across language boundaries.