Context And Optimal Relevance Of Translation

The source text of the translation task is an excerpt from the first chapter of a book of historical review whose author is Babara Tuchman,an American female historian and writer,winner of the Pulitzer Prize for twice.The text comprehensively describes a series of folly policies pursued by governments in history and also some comments of the author.The commissioner is a friend who is interested but not majors in history and wants it to be reference material of history study.The translation strategy adopted is constructing optimal relevance between the author’s communicative intentions and the target readers’ cognitive ability to make the target readers understand the communicative intentions with least efforts.It is based on the relevance translation theory put forward by Ernst August Gutt.According to this theory,the principle of translation is relevance,and the translator refers the contextual implicature or the author’s communicative intentions through contextual analysis and reconstructing new context,under the principle of optimal relevance,for readers of the target text to make them gain the communicative intentions with least efforts.In this task,through analysis of lexical context and sentential context the implicature of a particular word or phrase are gained and through textual context the implicature of some particular sentences or a larger text are gained.In addition,analysis of situational context plays an important part in referring the author’s implied intentions and analysis of cultural context and historical context make more background or clues gained and reconstructed for readers so that they can get the communicative intentions to a larger extent.It is hoped by translating this task that such translation strategy can be received by more translators and relevance translation theory can instruct more translation practice,in particular translation of historical texts.This report is divided into four parts.Part one is an introduction to the task;Part two is the description of translation process;Part three focuses on case study,analyzing how the translation achieve optimal relevance through context;The last part concludes the major findings,limitations and suggestions found during writing the report.