| Five thousand years of Chinese history has cultivated a language which is characterized by its richness in culture and expressiveness in connotation. The Chinese language contains a large number of culture-specific or culturally fixed expressions generally covering idioms, proverbs, allusions collocations, etc. Those expressions are literarily beautiful, artistically impressive and culturally significant, carrying heavy historical connotations. They have been handed down from generation to generation in oral or written forms, constituting a great portion of our vocabulary in communication. The task of translating those highly culture-specific expressions to the foreign audience falls on the shoulders of translators, who serve as bridge in the cross-culture communication.Accomplishing the task represents huge difficulties due to the complex and subtle relationship between cognition, language and culture and due to the fact that translation lies somewhere between science and art. Therefore, translators are always earnestly arguing over what the best ways of translation is, which is expected to cross the cultural boundary skillfully and achieve good cognitive effect on the foreign audience. Thosearguments push forward the theoretical study and practice of translation. And out of the arguments come tremendous achievements, which are not yet perfect. The idea of this thesis is just inspired by such arguments.The thesis centers on the incompetence of relevance theory in culture-specific translation and tries to make up for the incompetence by applying metaphor in the hope of achieving equivalent-effect translation.The thesis is composed of five chapters.Chapter One serves as an introduction of the thesis, giving a general idea of the orientation, significance, feasibility and organization of the thesis.Chapter Two reviews the relevant literature. It examines the relationship between relevance and cognition, relevance and comprehension, and relevance and communication. It goes on to examine the development of the view of metaphor from Aristotle to Plato to the contemporary scholars.In Chapter Three, following the discussion about translatability and relationship between flexibility and accuracy, the thesis places the emphasis on translation in perspective of relevance theory. In order for "faithfulness", "expressiveness" and "elegance", equivalent-effect translation insists on dynamic equivalence. According to relevance theory, people tend to avoid mentioning the knowledge that they share in order to achieve maximum contextual effect with minimum efforts, seeking optimal relevance. Based on the principle of optimal relevance, situational default arises. One subcategory of situational default is termed cultural default, which means the absence of the cultural background of proverbs and idioms from the text. Within a culture, there will be no obstacle in communication between the author of the original and his intended audience, while there surely will be some problems between the author of the original and the non-intended audience. Thus, the effect of the original on the intended audience is not equivalent to the effect of the translation on the non-intended audience. This is where the incompetence of relevance theory in culture-specific translation lies. And this is why it is so hard to translate idioms and proverbs, which are highly culture-specific. Though, "hard to translate" does not mean "impossible to translate". Translators can turn to metaphor for help.Chapter Four discusses the application of metaphor to translation. Revolutionary breakthrough has been made in understanding metaphor, which used to be seen as merely a rhetorical device and now as a cognitive instrument or even a way of thinking.If language is viewed as the surface structure of our mind, and mind is viewed as the deep structure of language, then the very fact that peoples worldwide with various languages have been co-existing harmoniously in the world ever since is revealing. It indicates that behind the c...
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