A Comparative Study Of Rong’s And He’s Versions Of Oliver Twist From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Relevance theory holds that verbal communication is an ostensive-inferentialmanifest process in which comprehending utterances is a cognitive activity. Gutt firstintroduces the relevance-theoretic approach to translation, combining the principle ofrelevance with cognitive psychology. It indicates that translation, in its nature, is aspecial interlingual cross-cultural communication. Translation process involvescommunication among three parts, namely, the source text author, the translator andthe target readers. The translator plays double roles in this process. On one hand, as arecipient, he or she should infer the communicative intention of the source text author;on the other hand, as a communicator, he or she should have a good knowledge of thecognitive environment of the target readers and then convey the communicativeintention of the source text author to them properly. That is to say, the translatorshould endeavor to look for optimal relevance between the source text and the targetreaders, making the target readers obtain adequate contextual effects without payingunnecessary processing effort. Oliver Twist, a famous English novel, is written byCharles Dickens, a master of critical realism in the19thcentury. Since the book waspublished, there appeared26Chinese versions.Two versions which have high market recognition, that is Rong Rude’s and HeWen’an’s versions, are selected as the research objective of this thesis. The thesischooses relevance theory as its theoretical basis and compares the two Chineseversions from the two aspects that may influence the realization of optimal relevance,that is, contextual assumption and informative and communicative intentions bymeans of quantitative, qualitative and comparative analysis. From the perspective ofcontextual assumption, He Wen’an’s translation neglects much cultural backgroundinformation in the source text, such as, the characters, the events and the places,which may lead to the loss of relevance and the failure of translation communication due to the disparity of cognitive environment between the original readers and thetarget readers. By contrast, Rong Rude’s translation takes the disparity of cognitiveenvironment into consideration and reserves lots of cultural background informationof the source text. From the perspective of informative and communicative intentions,both the two Chinese versions neglect some communicative clues in the original text,which may lead to the separation of informative and communicative intentions. Andthen the loss of relevance may occur. Thus, whether the translator supplies the neededcontextual assumptions for the target readers and matches the informative andcommunicative intentions or not will directly influence the realization of optimalrelevance.In order to realize optimal relevance, similar or different methods are adopted bythe two translators. On the basis of the comparison of these similarities anddifferences, the author of this thesis concludes five translation strategies which canhelp achieve optimal relevance in literary translation, that is, foreignization plusannotation, domestication, addition, reconstruction and explicitation, hoping toimprove the translation of Oliver Twist and provide guidance to literary translation.