An increasing number of scholars try to find out more about better ways as guidelines for translation, with which translation is studied more easily, taught more reasonably and criticized more convincingly. Why bother with pragmatic translation unit? Because finding translation unit and probing into its pragmatic meaning to solve translation problems is a useful approach to tackling problems during translation process in one way or another.
To find answers to many underlying questions surrounding translation needs the help of linguistic knowledge, which is used to study translation by many accredited scholars. And the development of translation studies depends on that of linguistics to some extent. And pragmatics, which has got many achievements in recent years, acts as one of the providers of theoretical base for translation, language teaching, language research, interpersonal communication and many other disciplines. In fact, many pragmatic research results make contributions to the explaQYH nation of translation phenomena. As a part of pragmatics, relevance theory, which is put forward by Sperber and Wilson (1986), together with relevance theoretical approach to translation developed by Gutt (1991) in his work of Translation and Relevance: Cognition and Context, is helpful in the recognition and understanding of translation problems. Therefore, relevance theory is chosen to solve translation problems. And translation unit, the value of which is that it is the provider for an approach to tackling translation obstacles (Xu, 2004), is studied by many scholars. For example, from grammatical and semantic perspectives, translation unit is defined according to the semantic meaning of source text in the process of rendering information (Barkhudarov, 1985). However, due to complicated factors affecting translation process, there is a far way to go in order to use translation unit to resolve translation problems effectively or to explain translation phenomena reasonably. Among many researches on translation unit, fewer discussions are done on the establishment of it.
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1.2 Significance
This thesis takes relevance theory as theoretical base for translation unit studies. Translation unit is studied by many scholars from different perspectives because of its complexity in definition. With a detailed account of the concepts of pragmatic translation unit, the thesis enriches the studies on translation unit, which is a try to know more about the mechanism of applying pragmatic translation unit to solve translation problems. It centers on helping the translator to do better under intratextual and extratextual context by inference to get optimal relevance. To state more clearly, a definition of pragmatic translation unit is put forward, together with the ranks, principles, identification and nature of it. The procedures and translation methods in using pragmatic translation unit endow it with a practical way in order to shed some light on the application of pragmatic translation unit. The thesis evokes readers’ awareness of the connection between translation unit and &nbs
