A Report On The E-C Translation Of Tuff (Excerpt) Under The Guidance Of Relevance Translation Theory

This is an E-C translation report on the translation of Paul Beatty’s novel Tuff.Paul Beatty is an African-American author who won the Man Booker Prize for his novel The Sellout in 2016.Tuff portrays typical images of black people and depicts their living conditions in American society.The whole novel is extremely humorous and satirical,with a black rap music rhythm and talk-show-like language style.With the author’s sharp satire on racial discrimination in American society,he also makes readers reflect on the self-identification of black people in this new era.The deeprooted racial discrimination has become grievously social for the United States in recent years,especially with the spreading of COVID-19 around the world.Such translations enable people to gain a better understanding of western society and reduce misunderstandings in cross-cultural communication.The translator selects chapter three and chapter four as the material for translation practice as the two chapters better describe Tuff’s daily life.Based on the humorous and satirical style of the original text,Relevance Translation Theory is taken as the guidance in this translation project,which is applied throughout the whole process of pre-translation preparation,translation output,and post-translation reflection.Unlike other types of texts,humorous and satirical texts employ’’unconventional’’ language.And this novel contains special linguistic and cultural characteristics,such as black English and culture-loaded words.In addition,the United States is a country with a historical and cultural background of racial discrimination,which could be difficult for Chinese readers to understand.Relevance Translation Theory was first advocated by Ernst-August Gutt in Translation and Relevance: Cognition and Context(1991)which holds that translation is a process of inference.The author claims that the target reader should get a similar contextual effect as the source-language reader.So the target text should be faithful to the relevance between the source text and the reader’s cognitive environment.In the case studies,the translator elaborates on the guiding role of this theory.The whole translation process is guided by Relevance Translation Theory,which can further prove its applicability to the translation of humorous and satirical texts.Moreover,the translator generalizes the translation strategies applicable to such texts,so as to better provide guidance.This translation report is divided into five chapters.Chapter One is the introduction,which introduces the task description,the source text and the author,the purpose and significance of the writing,and the main framework of this translation report.Chapter Two is the description of the whole translation process,including the preparation before translation,the detailed steps during translation,and the proofreading after translation.Chapter Three introduces Relevance Translation Theory that guides the translation practice in this report.Chapter Four is a case study,which illustrates the application of Relevance Translation Theory at the linguistic and cultural levels respectively,with the linguistic level further divided into the lexical,syntactic,and rhetorical levels.Chapter Five is a conclusion,summarizing the major findings and imperfections as well as the limitations in this translation practice.