On Conversation Translation In Chinese Classic All Men Are Brothers In The Frame Of Relevance Theory

Sperber and Wilson (2001), who have defined relevance in Communication and Cognition, hold that the correct understanding of natural language is based on inferring relevance from communication. Gutt(2000)has further developed their theory in translation. The author in this thesis attempts to analyze All Men Are Brothers (1993) by comparing it with Shapiro's Version Outlaws of Marsh(\999) from the perspective of relevance theory. Basic concepts of optimal relevance in relevance theory have been employed, which hold it important to analyze the cognitive environment of TL readers in order to achieve optimal relevance as the criteria to evaluate the result of translation. This thesis organizes as follows.Chapter One is a survey of fictional conversation. The author explores the fictional conversation from the rather traditional perspective of narrative, discussing the nature of fictional conversation and its translation, four major forms, and the functions of fictional conversation.Chapter Two gives a brief account of the context, and expounds the application of context to the translation of fictional conversation to understand and reproduce the implied meaning.In Chapter Three, the author gives a brief survey of the story, which, based on the development of peasant heroes rising against the ruling class, reveals to us the life of all social strata at that time. Then, through a brief introduction to Outlaws of Marsh abroad and of studies about the English version All Men Are Brothers, the author points out the inadequacy of traditional definition of context, the merits of applying cognitive context in judging translation work and further proposes the possibility and necessity of application of the relevance theory to the analysis of the version All Men Are Brothers.Chapter Four classifies some basic concepts of relevance theory (RT) in translation: cognitive context, informative intention, communicative intension, ostensive-inferential communication, and optimal relevance. According to RT, translation is the ostensive-inferential process in which the translator interprets the source language, and then conveys the communicative intension to the target language (TL) readers. The translator, as a communicator to TL readers, should take the potential cognitive context into consideration to find the optimal relevance in his translation.Chapter Five further develops the argument of the thesis, in which the author analyzes the search for optimal relevance both in the situational context and social-culture context. The author finds that Pearl's treatment with words in situational context is effective, which indicates her understanding of the text and her capacity to infer the cognitive environment of TL readers. However, Pearl's translation approaches in employing culture-specific diction have brought about much argument in the academic field, for she frequently ignores supplementary techniques, such as literal translation plus annotation. Anyhow, in most cases she employs cultural transplantation, cultural explanation techniques in translation, and decides subjectively which information is important, which is less significant. When there is much similarity between culture-loaded words, her approach in translation seems to be determined by her translation goal, so that she seems to have come nearer to the goal of gaining optimal relevance. However, in the process Pearl makes some obvious mistakes, which should have resulted from her translation strategy.Finally, the author attempts to propose that the translator, who should not ignore the similarities of the human life, should have confidence in the creative ability of the TL readers while he should pay enough attention to the difficulties caused by the gaps between two different cultures, so that he is able to obtain appropriate contextual effects without misleading the TL readers.