Introduction

Building on the ideas of Gutt (1998, 2000, 2004), this paper makes use of the advances of Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986) to accommodate selected issues in Translation Studies. It attempts to demonstrate the impact that the consideration of relevance might have on the decision-making process of translation. A further matter considered here is whether translation is always to be seen as governed solely by the principles of intralingual communication.

Relevance: contextual effects vs. processing effort

Relevance Theory offers a novel cognitively-oriented theoretical foundation to account for the rules underlying human communication. Sperber and Wilson (1986: 122) state that “an assumption is relevant in a context if and only if it has some contextual effect in that context.” Yet, as they go on to expound, relevance is a matter of degree which generally depends upon a trade-off between the contextual effects obtained by processing an input and the effort spent in the process.

The cognitive principle of relevance, one of the central tenets of Relevance Theory, holds that “human cognition tends to be geared towards the maximisation of relevance” (Sperber and Wilson 1986: 260). Thus, the addressees expect the stimuli produced by the sender to provide them with positive contextual/cognitive effects without forcing them to spend more energy than is necessary on processing the stimuli. This suggests that, if acquiring a piece of information is too costly compared to the cognitive benefits it brings, the audience should be spared any effort whatsoever.