The Essence of Translating Under the Pragmatic Theories

Translation is one of the cross-cultural activities. Whereas a multitude of text-centered translation theories regard translation as a static description over the past decades,the pragmatic theories suggest that the essence of translating is ostensive-inferential activity,therefore a dynamic process.On the basis of the summary and analysis of the pragmatic theories,especially the relevance theory,the paper expounds that translation will necessarily make a breakthrough with the instruction of the pragmatic theories.Also,the paper brings forth the translatability of some figures of speech of Chinese language and discusses whether the pragmatic theories could provide reasonable explanation.