Translation Compensation Strategies Of Malapropism From The Relevance-Adaptation Perspective

In the profound and extensive language and literature of English and Chinese, there is one kind of vivid, elegant rhetoric containing abundant cultural factors, which can be called malapropism. It makes language full of humor, vivid, implicative and thought-provoking. Therefore, it is most cherished by writers. Malapropism rooted in different cultures carry along with their different characteristics and ways of expressions, linguistically and culturally.However, some of them are rarely noticed by people. Furthermore, due to language and cultural differences between English and Chinese, translation of malapropism is always a huge challenge for translators, and some even consider it impossible.Relevance Theory, proposed by Sperber and Wilson and applied into translation practices by Ernest Gutt, interprets translation from a cognitive perspective, regarding translation as an intra-lingual or inter-lingual ostensive-inferential process, in which the translator and the target readers seek optimal relevance in the source cognitive context and target cognitive context respectively. Adaptation Theory put forward by Jef. Verschueren sees translation as a process of continuous choice-making characterized by variability, negotiability and adaptability.Translation scholars in China integrate strong points and complementary ingredients of the two theories, tentatively proposing the Relevance-Adaptability Theoretic Approach to illustrate the whole translating process. This new approach takes translation as a process in which the translator makes inferences in accordance with the author's ostension, finds optimal relevance to the source texts, and finally makes dynamic adaptations in the target texts at every possible level in the process of choice-making of specific strategies. Moreover, it emphasizes the importance of context and the central role of a translator in the actual translating process. With the examples selected from the English and Chinese literatures, this thesis aims at making a study of malapropism translation process and an analysis of the compensation strategies authors adopt from the perspective of Relevance-Adaptability Theoretic Approach.