A Study On Translation Strategies Of Culturally-Loaded Words In Mao Tun's Works From The Perspective Of Relevance-Adaptation Theory

As a new integrated pragmatics theory, Relevance-Adaptation Theory (RAT) is established on the basis of Sperber & Wilson's Relevance Theory (RT) and Verschueren's Adaptation Theory (AT). From the perspective of cognition, RAT provides communication with the principle that acts as the guide or purpose and a series of adaptive strategies which serve as the operator. Since RAT came into existence, it has enjoyed great popularity in various researches on euphemism, metaphor, pragmatic markers and translation. Translation itself is an inter-cultural communication activity, but scholars and researchers in their previous studies on application of RAT in translation pay more attention to the strong interpretive power of the theory and explanation of translating process in the practical texts, and few of them investigate translation principle and strategies of culturally-loaded words in Chinese literature works. Culturally-loaded words are regarded as the most distinctive elements that reflect a particular culture and the translation problems of Chinese culturally-loaded words have been being barriers that hinder target language (TL) readers from understanding and appreciating source language (SL). Therefore, based on the communicative concept and process of RAT, this thesis takes the culturally-loaded words in Mao Tun's works as examples and combines theoretical deduction with specific case illustrations, which aims to find a systematic translation principle and corresponding strategies for culturally-loaded words.The outline of this thesis is summarized as the following:The paper first presents a brief review of culturally-loaded words, including definition, classification,traditional translation strategies and translation problems. Next, in order to solve the existing problems, it resorts to Relevance-Adaptation Theory by integrating Relevance Theory and Adaptation Theory and points out that the essence of successful communication lies in the principle of optimal relevance and in order to achieve optimal relevance between the speaker and the hearer, the speaker makes choices and proceeds utterances that dynamically adapt to the hearer's context (physical world, social world and psychological world), language use and salience. Finally, this thesis lays more emphasis on strategies of applying RAT in the translation of culturally-loaded words in Mao Tun's works. This part finds out that translation is a unified process of relevance-seeking and dynamic adaptation, and the translator makes choices among various translation strategies (literal translation, literal translation with annotations, free translation, addition, replacement, omission, paraphrasing, etc), for one thing to optimally convey SL communicative intentions, for another to guarantee TL readers will get SL contextual effects as many as possible with proceeding effort as little as possible.Through theoretical deduction and case illustrations, some major findings are concluded as: the translation of culturally-loaded words from the perspective of RAT is a unified process of relevance-seeking and dynamic adaptation, in which optimal relevance achievement acts as the purpose or destination, relevance degree serves for the guide and dynamic adaptation is regarded as the operational strategy. In another words, taking relevance degree that results from physical images and connotations as the guide and according to the context, the translator dynamically makes choices among rendering strategies to achieve the optimal relevance between SL contextual assumptions and TL readers'cognitive ability. Besides, the translation strategies of culturally-loaded words in Mao Tun's works also shed light on solving problems caused by cultural conflicts in the translation of other literatures.