A Study Of Culturally-loaded Words And Its Translation From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

In recent years, there are two tendencies in translation studies: First, the translation practice isregarded as a communicative actï¼›Second, the focus on the study of such communication involving threeparties has transferred from the linguistic level to the cultural level. But this doesn't mean the language asa carrier of culture can be ignored. The word is the smallest unit which directly reflects a nation's unique culture in language and culturallyloaded words are among thses words. These words are very common inthe literary works and the translation of them has long been a difficult problem for the scholars. TheScholars, as a very famous satire work in China, contains a lot of such words in customs, education,religion and the society. The Yangs translated the work successfully and many foreign scholars regard it asan encyclopedia of Chinese culture. For this reason, the author of this paper chooses some of theseculturallyloaded words from this book and uses the relevance theory to analyze them.The relevance theory, as a cognitive theory, offers the most powerful theoretical frame to explain the"translation"which has long be thought as the most difficult cognitive act. But there are some one whotakes the negative attitude towards it. They think the translation guided by the relevance translationprinciples is"assimilation"because the translator tends to replace some expressions with those familiar tothe TL readers. Therefore, this paper aims to analyze the culturallyloadedwords under the cognitive perspective of human being. Then the paper used the relevance translation principles and strategiesproposed by Gutt to discuss the translation of culturallyloaded words. After that, the author found themethods under the relevance translation principles are various and the"assimilation"is only a small part ofit. In this paper, the author mainly did the following work to draw this conclusion:First, the author analyzed the causes of culturallyloaded words from the perspective of human cognition. Then she discussed the different culturallywordsin The Scholars in the cultural and semantic level.Second, the author studied the two principles of translation in relevance theory. 1. translation shouldproduce adequate contextual effects without putting the TL audience into gratuitous processing effort.2.The translation should make the SL writer's intention and the TL audience's expection meet.And finally, the author used the two strategies proposed by Gutt to study the different methods undereach strategies and at the same time analyzed them with the relevance translational principles.After the research, the author found that the relevance theory could be used as an effective theory toguide the translation of the culturallyloaded words. People's misunderstanding of it is mainly resulted from their misunderstanding of the very important concept"cognitive environment". It includes twoaspects: the old assumption and the ability to know the new assumption. If we only pay attention to theformer one, we may think the TL reader as a passive receiver. That is why some one regards the translationunder the relevance translation principles as"assimilation". In fact, the TL reader is an active one who canadjust the new assumption according to the old ones. Hence, we can see that any method is available on thecondition of"optimal relevance".