A Relevance Theoretic Account For The Transaltion Of Culture-loaded Words In Life And Death Are Wearing Me Out

With an accelerated development of cross-cultural communication, translationbecomes more and more important in cultural exchanges among different countries.The translation of Chinese literary works play an important role in internationalcultural exchange, but the translations of Chinese literary works are not well acceptedby western readers, a lack of qualified translator being one of the reasons. Chineseauthor Mo Yan has been awarded the2012Nobel Prize for literature, which sets asuccessful example for Chinese literary works going global. Mo Yan is one of theChinese novelists whose works are most frequently and accurately translated. Mo Yansincerely attributes his success to the translators who translate his books. Life andDeath Are Wearing Me Out is one of Mo Yan’s masterpieces, and its theme rightlycorresponds the praise the Swedish Academy give to his work which “withhallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary”. Life and DeathAre Wearing Me Out features a lot of culture-loaded words owing to its specialbackground and the author’s writing style. The translation of these culture-loadedwords poses great challenge for translators and it is also the key to the successfultranslation.This thesis intends to examine the translation of the culture-loaded words from aperspective of relevance-theoretic approach to translation. Based on the currentfindings of culture-loaded words and their translation and, analysis of typical examplesselected from Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, the thesis has sums up somepractical rules for the translation of culture-loaded words guided by the relevance-theoretic approach to translation. The author believes that the translator should handlethe relationship between the optimal relevance and maximal relevance properly, andthe optimal relevance in the original proposition and the contextual assumption shouldbe kept in the translation. The findings are expected to facilitate Chinese literary workgoing global.