Metaphor Translation Based On Relevance Translation Theory

As a common phenomenon in human's communication, metaphor is attracting more and more attention. Scholars have developed many theories such as comparison theory, interaction theory, mapping theory and conceptual blending theory. Scholars have also done a lot of researches about the nature of metaphor, which involve rhetoric, semantics, pragmatics, cognitive linguistics and so on. After a long history of metaphor research, metaphor now is considered as a universal thinking method and a cognitive tool. It reflects the features of different cultures such as in language, history, custom and psychology. Therefore, metaphor translation is becoming more and more important for successful communication between people with different cultural backgrounds.As Relevance Theory proposed by Sperber and Wilson provides a new perspective for the comprehension of metaphor, Gutts'Relevance Translation Theory offers a new research direction about metaphor translation. According to Relevance Theory, language communication is an ostensive-inference process involving people's cognitive activity. While the feature of people's cognitive activity is acquiring maximum contextual effects with minimum inferential efforts, which is called optimal relevance in the theory, Relevant Translation Theory just commits in searching for optimal relevance. Language used in metaphor if often irregular and out of expect, thus to understand a metaphor means the reader must make reasonable inference and find optimal relevance. That will be difficult because of the plenty of contextual assumptions and complicated cultural factors. There is an introduction of Relevance Translation Theory and a reveal of the communicative and inferential feature of translation in this thesis. And there is also a detailed discussion about many concepts such as maximal relevance, optimal relevance, processing efforts, contextual assumption and so on.Applying Relevance Translation Theory to metaphor translation, this thesis concludes three principles with the purpose of achieving optimal relevance which is the effect of metaphor in metaphor translation.