On Translation Of Children’s Literature From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Children’s literature translation is a branch of the literary translation, but for thespecialty of its readers, children’s literature translation is an important but neglectedpart. For the limited cognitive ability of children and the differences between Chineseand Western culture, children’s literature translation is a challenging job to translators.As a translator, firstly he must understand children and children’s literature thoroughly.Therefore this paper attempts to explore children’s literature translation from theperspective of relevance theory with children’s literature as the theme.Relevance theory is a theory of cognitive pragmatics put forwards by Sperber&Wilson (1986), it attracts many linguists’ attention in recent years. Relevance theoryreveals that human communication is an ostensive-inferential process from the angleof cognition. It holds that human has an instinct of pursuing relevance, the degree ofrelevance is determined by two factors, that is contextual effect of an utterance andthe effort required to process the utterance. In communication, communicator andaudience try their best to pursue optimal relevance, that is to say, to achieve greatercontextual effect with less processing effort. Gutt (1991) studies translation withrelevance theory. He further develops relevance theory and advocates many insightfulviewpoints, for instance, translation is an interpretive use of language, and he putsforward direct translation and indirect translation based on it. Therefore, relevancetheory realizes its guidance in translation.This paper aims to use the instruction of relevance theory and Gutt’s relevancetranslation theory, summarizes how translators do in children’s literature translationand what translation strategies should be adopted to make sure target language readersunderstand and accept the target language through comparing and analyzingexamples in children’s literature translation. Firstly the paper studies how translatorsmake inference to the author’s intentions in the process of children’s literaturetranslation, how translators show the author’s intentions to target readers, how topursue optimal relevance in the process of translation. Then it analyzes how to applyGutt’s direct translation and indirect translation approaches to the practice ofchildren’s literature translation.