A Report On The C/E Translation Of Records Of Streets And Alleys In Chengdu (excerpt) From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Every country and nation has unique cultural characteristics and symbols,and the development of the times has continuously given these characters a new context and meaning.The relevance theory proposed by Sperber and Wilson has been further developed by Gutt,which skillfully realizes its combination with translation practice.This theory further highlights human cognitive context and believes that translation is a practical activity in which all conditions are fully utilized to create appropriate contexts and constantly seek for the optimal relevance.Relevance theory emphasizes that once the readers of the translation have made effective inferring effort,they can obtain good contextual effects to establish the optimal relevance with the original author.Accordingly,both the informative and communicative intentions of the original author will be successfully conveyed.Records of Streets and Alleys in Chengdu by Yuan Tingdong is a book introducing the long development of Chengdu by focusing on streets,bridges and rivers.Its purpose is to let more and more Chinese and foreign readers get to know and appreciate Chengdu.From the perspective of communicative purpose,it is realistic and feasible for this C/E translation project to adopt the relevance theory as its theoretical guidance.From concepts related to relevance theory,including the ostensive-inferential communication,contextual effect,the maximum relevance and the optimal relevance,the translator analyzes how to improve the translator's academic ability and effectively display her subjectivity in translation practice.Under the guidance of the theory,the translator excerpts the chapter named Bridges over the Nanhe River andadopts six translation methods such as transliteration and annotation,omission,amplification,conversion,negation and inversion to transform the source text,making great effort to faithfully and efficaciously express both the informative and communicative intentions of the original author to the target readers.