Translation Report On E-C Translation Of Milkman (Excerpted)from The Perspective Of Relevance-theoretic Translation Theory

This is an English-Chinese translation practice report on the base of the first two chapters of Milkman written by an Irish writer Anna Burns,and it won the The Man Booker Prize in 2018.As for the story of the source text,Milkman is a novel written under the background of the Northern Ireland issue 60 years ago,and the source text is a typical work of stream-of-consciousness text.The features of the source text are as follows: from the perspective of rhetoric skills,it is mainly embodied in the use of specific punctuation,the expression of hidden meaning and the use of italics to highlight key points;and from the perspective of rhetoric poetics,the source text has a large number of inner monologue,free association and fragmented narration,reflecting the narrative characteristics of the stream-of-consciousness text.Based on the features of the source text,this report chooses Ernst-August Gutt’s Relevance-theoretic Translation Theory as the guidance and adopts corresponding translation strategies to make the translation easy to read while retaining a part of features of the source text.According to Relevance-theoretic Translation Theory,translation is a double ostentation-inferential process.First,the source text author gives ostentation,and the translator makes inferential;second,the translator gives ostentation in the target text,and readers make inferential.At the same time,the translator needs to maximize the contextual effect while minimizing the reader’s inference efforts so as to achieve optimal relevance.This report is divided into five chapters.The first chapter gives a brief introduction to the translation project,the translation process and the significance of the project;the second chapter briefly introduces the main features of the stream of consciousness text,and then analyzes the basic features of the source text from the perspective of rhetoric skills and rhetoric poetics;the third chapter reviews Gutt’s Relevance-theoretic Translation Theory;the fourth chapter makes a case study under the guidance of this theory as well as the features of the source text analyzed in the second chapter: this chapter takes the features of the source text,the way of characterization and the stream of consciousness as the three basic dimensions,and makes detailed analysis of the translation;and the conclusion part summarizes the gains and shortcomings of the whole translation practice.This report holds the idea that in literary translation,the translator could combine the communicative purpose of the source text author with the cognitive environment of the target text readers,and strive to achieve a balance between inference efforts of the readers’ and the contextual effect of the target text,that is,to achieve optimal relevance.Through the translation and analysis of the Milkman,this report hopes to make a modest contribution to the Chinese translation of Irish literature.