Study Of Michael Berry’s English Version Of Huo Zhe From The Perspective Of Relevance-adaptation Theory

Huo Zhe,published in 1992,is the most influential work of the famous Chinese writer Yu Hua.Since it was translated into English by the American scholar Michael Berry in 2003,it has attracted wide attention from foreign readers.With the deepening of cultural exchanges between China and the other countries,more and more scholars have begun to analyze the work Huo Zhe and the translated version To Live,such as from the aspects of ideology,ecology and literary communication.However,few scholars analyze the work from the Relevance-Adaptation Theory.Relevance-Adaptation Theory is based on Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory and Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory.In Relevance-Adaptation Theory,translating process contains the ostensive-inferential communicative process,the process of finding the optimal relevance and dynamic adaptation process.And then translator needs to find the optimal relevance in the cognitive context of the original text,and then make dynamic adaptation in the target cognitive context so as to meet the needs of target readers.In ostensive-inferential communicative process,the original author makes ostensive behaviors based on the cognitive ability and environment of the target readers of the original text,while the translator infers the ostensive actions of the author,then conducts contextual assumptions,finds the optimal relevance,and finally uses contextual reconstruction to achieve contextual effects.In the process of dynamic adaptation,the translator investigates the cognitive environment of the target readers,including adaptation at the linguistic level and contextual level,so as to gain the optimal relevance between the original author and the target language readers,so that the target readers can better understand the original text.From the view of Relevance-Adaptation Theory,this thesis selects some specific examples from the Chinese and English versions of Huo Zhe by combining the descriptive study and case study,and the following conclusions can be drawn:in the translation process,the translator took into account the differences in language expression between Chinese and English,the different ways of thinking between the original readers and the target readers,as well as the acceptability and aesthetic differences of the target readers.In order to better convey the expected information in the original text,the translator has gone through the following two issues:discourse-interpreting communicative process and discourse-producing communicative process,adopting different translation methods,successfully taking into account the cultural connotation of the original text and the ability of the target readers,and achieved the optimal relevance.This thesis can give us a clearer understanding of the translator’s cognitive and psychological activities in translating Huo Zhe,as well as improve our abilities in pragmatics and translation,which has a certain guiding significance for literary translation and provides a new perspective for literary translation.