A Study Of Culture-Loaded Words In The Thai Version Of The Garlic Ballads Based On Relevance Theory

The Garlic Ballads,Mo Yan’s second full-length novel,was published in Thailand in 2014.The book won the Thai Best Translated Novel Award in 2017 and has been praised as an epic by the Thai literary field.This work contains a large number of typical Chinese culture-loaded words such as Shandong rural dialects,idioms,colloquialisms,proverbs,allegorical sayings,vulgar words,etc.,which not only enriches the content of the work,but also gives the novel a unique Chinese charm.As a special cultural carrier,culture-loaded words have surpassed the language itself,and contain the unique ecological,social,material,religious,and other meanings of the culture.Furthermore,the translation of culture-loaded words is also the biggest problem in literary translation.Therefore,it is necessary to study the translation of cultural-loaded words in Mo Yan’s works.Relevance theory has a strong explanatory power for the special translation phenomenon of cultural-loaded words.It regards translation as a dual ostensive-inferential process involving the author,translator,and target reader.The reasoning is based on relevance and it is believed that the object of translation research is the operation process of the information processing mechanism in the translator’s brain.The translation is a process in which the translator fully understands the original author’s intentions and expresses them in the target language,and provides sufficient contextual effects for the target language readers to achieve a successful communication.The optimal relevance is the goal of the translator,and it is also the criterion for the evaluation of the translation.The translator should try his best to match the original author’s intention with the target reader’s expectation.This thesis takes the culture-loaded words in the Thai translation of The Garlic Ballads translated by the native Thai translator Mendri Jianzha Rongyong()as the research object,guided by the relevance theory.According to Eugene A.Nida’s classification of cultural elements,the culture-loaded words in the work can be divided into:ecological culture-loaded words,social culture-loaded words,material culture-loaded words,religious culture-loaded words,and linguistic culture-loaded words,which is a typical example,then respectively discusses and summarizes the translation strategies of culture-loaded words.The research shows that when translating culturally loaded words,the main translation strategies used by translators are direct translation and indirect translation.Direct translation includes literal translation,literal translation withannotation;indirect translation includes substitution,free translation,and omission.When translating,the translator should adopt different translation methods and strategies so that the translation can effectively convey the original intention in the communicative context,and the translation can have the best correlation with the cognitive context of the target language readers.The choice of translation strategy mainly depends on the translator’s correct assessment of the target language reader’s cognitive context.Therefore,translators can combine relevance theory when translating literary works with strong Chinese and cultural characteristics.