On The Translation Of Metaphors In Red Sorghum From The Perspective Of The Relevance Translation Theory

Metaphor, as a language phenomenon in human communication, is drawingmore and more attention. It is not only an effective rhetorical means, but also a mainmethod of cognition. On the basis of similarity, metaphor helps to turn difficulty intosimplicity, abstraction into concreteness and strangeness into familiarity. Metaphors inliterary works achieve great effects of vividness while cognizing various topics.However, metaphor translation is always a big problem which the translators have totackle.According to the Relevance Theory, human communication is actually anostensive-inferential process which is ostensive for the speaker and inferential for thehearer. Successful verbal communication is always governed by the principle ofrelevance under which the hearer tries to seek optimal relevance based on theostension from the speaker and identify the speaker’s informative intention andcommunicative intention.According to the Relevance Translation Theory, metaphor is an interpretive useof languge, constituting normal rather than abnormal utterances, hence requiring nospecial interpretive abilities and procedures. It is the natural result of the developmentof ordinary cognitive inferential ability. Translation is a dual ostensive-inferentialprocess which lies among the original writer, translator and Target Text readers. Thiskind of ostensive-inferential process is conducted between two languages withdifferent cultures. Therefore, the translator’s task is to infer the original writer’sintention on the basis of the relevance principle, and relay the ostension of the originalwriter under the optimal relevance principle in the ways of meeting the cognitiveenvironment of the general Target Text readers. In other words, the optimal relevanceis the criterion for metaphor translation, which is constrained by two sub-principles:the translator should make sure the information he presents is of optimal relevancewithin his ability; his translation should not cause unnecessary processing efforts toTarget Text readers.The thesis combines theoretic analysis with case studies. The two sub-principlesof the optimal relevance principle are applied to evaluating the quality of metaphortranslations in Red Sorghum against the Chinese original. Where the translation doesnot achieve optimal relevance, suggestions for improvement are given. The studiesshow that the principle of optimal relevance is indeed the effective touchstone toevaluate metaphor translations in literary works.