A Report On The E-C Translation Of Slave Empire:How Slavery Built Modern Britain(Excerpts) From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

This translation practice report takes the translation practice of Slave Empire:How Slavery Built Modern Britain as an example to explore the English-Chinese translation of historical academic texts based on Relevance Theory.Slave Empire presents a history of the rise and fall of plantation slavery in the British Empire and explores the relationship between antislavery,imperial conquest,and global capitalism.According to Relevance Theory,translation is a dual ostensive-inferential communication between the author,the translator,and the readers,so after analyzing the typical translation cases,the translator believes that different translation strategies can be applied to achieve optimal relevance between the original text and the translated text mainly through the following two aspects: in the first round of communication,the translator needs to access the author’s cognitive context,when the translation needs to retain the communicative clues,direct translation could be adopted to guide the readers to obtain the author’s intention;and when the translation needs to make adjustments in the expression form to retain the cognitive effect of the source text,indirect translation could be employed to achieve the contextual effect.In the second round of communication,the translator needs to consider the readers’ cognitive context and can make the readers obtain the maximum contextual effect through linguistic,cultural,and aesthetic compensation.As historical academic texts involve not only historical facts but also the author’s opinions,the translator should take into account the accuracy and fluency of the translation while exerting subjective initiative to objectively reproduce the communicative intentions of the author.It is hoped that this report could provide a reference for subsequent translation practice of historical academic texts.