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Chapter Two Literature Review
To present research status of the study on translation unit and to provide theoretical framework for the pragmatic approaches to it, an account of what has been published on translation unit and relevance theory by accredited scholars and researchers are discussed. A brief introduction to relevance theory is also made in the following parts.
As the basic unit for explaining and processing translation problems, translation unit has exerted great influences on the comprehension of translation. Many researches have done to find out reasonable ways to defining translation unit and to know its application by scholars and translators. The study on translation unit intrigues many scholars’ interests, which is a critical point in translator’s decision-making. Research done for translation unit is summarized as follows. Sparkling thoughts are offered by scholars from many countries on the study of translation unit. A representative person in translation unit studies is prestigious linguistician Barkhudarov (1985) from former Soviet Union. He regards translation unit as “the smallest unit that has its equivalent in the target language text” in the book of Language and Translation, which exerts great influences upon translation unit studies and is accepted by many translators. (Wang, 2010) Barkhudarov’s study is done under the background of the existence of two schools of translation theory in the Soviet Union, which are linguistic school and art school (Cai, 1983).
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2.2 Studies on Relevance Theory
Relevance theory is one of the three theories in pragmatics. The other two are adaption theory and meme theory (Liu, 2008). Relevance theory has given a more precise definition of communication, by combining decoding and inferential processes together, thus providing a general framework for the pragmatic interpretation of communication. It has broadened the research scope of traditional pragmatics to a more open one. Therefore, relevance theory is chosen to be the provider for theoretical base in the analysis of pragmatic translation unit. In 1986, relevance theory was proposed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson in their book of Relevance: Cognition and Communication, which has great influences on linguistics. It supplies explanation of linguistic communication from aspects of linguistic philosophy, intercommunication &nb
