Transference Of The Optimal Relevance

Tao Yuanming(365~427)was the greatest poet who was born after Qu Yuan and before Li Bai and Du fu. He enjoyed a great fame in the poetry arena at home and abroad. His fresh, natural and sincere poems attracted many translators to introduce them to the western readers. His pastoral poems, though not many, are the most distinctive and most successful, which have been translated by lots of scholars into English.Tao Yuanming's pastoral poetry reveals, between the lines, the poet's love for nature and the spirit to be content with poverty. Therefore, how to reproduce this style becomes the key factor in translation. Although poetic style has always been viewed as intangible and illusory, it's still knowable because any poem is aimed to embody its style in a code system-language. Therefore, style is necessarily symbolized by language. Style not only finds its expression in content, but also in the ways to express it, such as meter, form, syntax, morphology and rhetoric which are called formal signs. On top of that, style also possesses such characteristics as the internal romantic charm, vigor, momentum, and motif, which are called the non-formal signs. They were embodied through the technique of expression, the writer's personality and his emotion, and the vision fusion of the receptors. In poetry translation, one of the most difficult tasks is how to maintain the adaptation of the translation to the original, namely achieve the reproduction of style of the original in the translated text for the grasp of the whole meaning will be out of the question without the analysis of the original's style.It is considered that most of the stylistic signs including the formal and non-formal can be conveyed during poetry translation thanks to the congeniality of human's feeling and the generality of human's language to express it. Then how to measure this reproduction of style? The introduction of optimal relevance (OR) will nodoubt offer an objective and efficient standard to test it. According to principle of relevance, every act of ostensive communication communicates the presumption of its own optimal relevance. Thus whenever someone shows that he wishes to communicate, he implicitly and automatically conveys the assumption that the hearer can expect to derive adequate contextual effects without spending unnecessary effort. Measured by this standard, this article analyzed how to create the relevant context, convey the OR, and finally reproduce the style at each level of formal and non-formal signs by means of domestication and foreignization.Of course as the achievement in the research of cognitive pragmatics, a complex discipline, the optimal relevance has also its weakness. Being unable to be quantified, the conception "optimal" is only relative: in terms of effect, the information acquiredby the reader is the intended assumption of the original author-either derivation ofcontextual implication, or the confirmation or elimination of the already- held assumption. Meanwhile when processing the information, the reader's effort should be worthwhile and necessary. From this angle, the OR may well be said to be a direction the translator should strive for.In brief, this thesis is aimed to prove that the poetic style can be reproduced more scientifically, hence poetry is not what lost in translation, it is rather what we gain through translators and translation.