A Case Study Of Two Chinese Translated Versions Of The Waste Land From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Relevance Theory,a cognitive theory of communication,is proposed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson.Ernst Gutt,student of Deirdre Wilson,is the first person who attempts to apply Relevance Theory into translation study.After a period of concentrated research,he gives a unified account of translation phenomena within relevance-theoretic framework.According to Relevance Theory,translation can be treated as communication among the original author,translator and receptor language reader.Translation process can be studies from the interpretation process anu expression process within relevance-theoretic framework.The Waste Land,a long poem written by T.S.Eliot,is one of the most prominent poems of the modern literature.In the poem,Eliot experiments with novel poetic forms and language.The Waste Land features many special uses of language,and allusions from myth and legend,works of literature,religious text;all of these make the poem obscure,difficult to understand,and hard to translate into Chinese in particular.But still there have been many experts trying their best to translate it and have their translations published.In fact,The Waste Land was first translated into Chinese by Zhao Luorui in 1937 and she published the revised translation of The Waste Land in 1980.Another famous translator Zha Liangzheng published his translation of The Waste Land in 1985.As is generally recognized,Zhao Luorui’s revised version and Zha Liangzheng’s version are two typical translations of The Waste Land,and they are both published by prestigious publishers in China.Therefore,this thesis intends to conduct a study of these two versions with the hope of gaining some translation experience,finding their translation problems,translation strategies to be employed and proving that Relevance Theory can be used to guide the translation of The Waste Land in the future.This thesis is composed of three parts:the first part is the introduction;the second part,being the main focus of the study,is divided into five chapters;and the last part is the conclusions tentatively drawn upon the researches done.Specifically,this thesis studies the translation of linguistic features of The Waste Land from four aspects:lexical categories,enjambement,figures of speech and collages,to analyze how the two translators deal with these linguistic features and explore whether they have retained these linguistic features in their translations,and tries to offer alternative reference translation that are thought to be more proper.Besides,the author conducts a detailed analysis of the improper translations found in the interpretation process and expression process in terms of stylistic feature,contextual clues and cultural perspective based on Relevance Theory.And finally,the conclusions tentatively drawn are(i):this research proves the feasibility of applying Relevance Theory to translation studies,especially poetry translation like The Waste Land,because Relevance Theory reveals explicitly that cognitive environment-linguistic,non-linguistic or cultural,plays an essential role in both interpretation and expression processes;(ii):translation,as a process or practice,involves two stages of communication,e.g.,first,between the original author and the translator,and second,between the translator and the prospective receptor language users or the target language readers;and(iii):good translation requires that translators should not only possess a mastery of the sources language and an adequate understanding of the environment in which the source language is used,but also a mastery of the target language and the environment in which the target language is used,and particularly they should have a thought familiarity of the cognitive environment that the prospective target readers presumably use in their reading and understanding processes of the prospective translated texts.