A Report On The Translation Of Outsiders:Five Women Writers Who Changed The World(Chapter Ⅴ)

The biography Outsiders: Five Women Writers Who Changed the World,written by the English writer Lyndall Gordon,was chosen as the translation material in this translation project.It is divided into five chapters,with each one introducing a woman writer who brought huge influence in the literature world.I translated Chapter Five: Explorer-Virginia Woolf,aiming to find out how Virginia created her great works in fighting against her disease,her suicidal impulses and the outside world.The present report,based on Relevance Theory,analyzes some selected cases of translation at both lexical and syntactic levels – with a focus on the domesticating and foreignizing strategies at the lexical level,and on the rebuilding of cultural relevance,readjustment of sentence order and shift of voice and subjects at the syntactic level.According to Relevance Theory,the greater contextual effect an utterance produces,or the lower processing efforts the hearer expends,the greater relevance of an utterance to the hearer.Translation,a special kind of verbal communication,contains two ostensiveinferential processes in which the translator should try to maximize contextual effects and minimize the target readers’ processing efforts so as to create an optimally relevant translation.The report consists of five parts.The first part is project description,including background information about the author and the source text as well as the significance and structure of the report.The second part introduces the whole process of the translation project.Chapter 3 reviews some key concepts in Relevance Theory,especially Gutt’s relevance-theoretical account of translation.Chapter 4 is a case study of some selected translation examples under the guidance of Relevance Theory.The final part includes a brief summary of the report plus some limitations and suggestions.