Translation Strategies Of Hamlet From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Hamlet is a classical work, which plays a great role in the literature history of the entire world. Chinese people have different cultures and thinking patterns from people in Western countries. As a result, there are some differences in language structures and images between Chinese and English. Therefore, how to present the best translation of it to the Chinese readers has been a heated academic topic and has been attracting lots of scholars to work on it industriously.Relevance Theory is a far-reaching theory in pragmatics about communication. It regards communication as an ostensive-inferential process. It assumes that a successful communication highly depends on optimal relevance. Relevant-theoretical translation treats translation as a dual-ostensive-inferential process among 3 parts: original text, translator and target readers.This thesis studies translation strategies based on translations about language structures and images in Hamlet, from the perspective of Relevance Theory. This research indicates: at first, for the part where there is a big gap between original language structures and target language structures or between original images and target images, translators should choose domestication strategy. Next, for the part where the original text provides target readers adequate contextual clues, or the original culture has been accepted by target readers, or there is no difficulty for target readers to infer the communicative and informative intention of the original text, translators should adopt foreignization strategy because in these cases the target readers will not pay too much cognitive processing effort. At last, for some part, if some cognitive schema slots are added to the translation, the exotic flavor of the original text will be preserved, and target readers will not spend extra cognitive processing effort, the compensation strategy should be employed.Through comparative and contrast analyses on the three translation versions of Hamlet, what is mentioned above have been proved. It can be concluded that Relevance Theory can be used for translators to choose the optimal translation strategy. Translations, in line with Relevance Theory, that cost the target readers the least cognitive processing effort and bring about the same contextual effects as what original readers gain are the best.