Relevance theory and the tactics of verbal comprehension in interpreting

Relevance Theory (Sperber Wilson, 1986) emphasizes that the success of verbal comprehension depends on two conditions: (1) whether the hearer can find out the optimal relevance of the source text to its context; (2) whether the hearer can infer from the relevance until the contextual effect is yielded. Generally speaking, if the relevance is close, the effort spent in inferring is little and the contextual effect is good; if the relevance is loose, the effort spent in inferring is great and the contextual effect is poor. According to this theory, in order to improve the speed and quality of verbal comprehension in interpreting, the interpreter should create a context closely related to the source or find out the relevance of the context to the source. This paper will make an exploratory research on the relevance theory as well as its help to the verbal comprehension in interpreting.