Style Translation In Fiction As Addressed From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Relevance theory, put forward by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson in their work Relevance: Communication and Cognition(1986), is a theory not only widely studied in many papers and works concerning linguistics but widely used in translation studies. Translation within the relevance-theoretic framework is an intralingual and interlingual communication with optimal relevance as the standard for evaluation. The application of relevance theory to translation has been discussed by many scholars while the studies of relevance theory with style translation turned out to be very limited. This thesis aims at applying the relevance theory to the translation of style in fiction. Due attention has not always been paid to fictional translation, as compared with the translation of other literary genres such as poetry. It is true to fiction, which, different from poetry, lacks subtle stylistic devices comparatively. But as fiction can always be appreciated by many scholars and common people, it is certain that fiction has its own aesthetic value which is represented by its style for its existence. Concerning the style translation, the author agrees on the translatability of style with the existence of degrees of translatability. Direct translation, put forward by Ernest-August Gutt in relevance translation theory, is adopted in this thesis while translating style in fiction by the preservation of communicative clues, which can be reflected by onomatopoeia, syntactic properties, semantic representations, and stylistic value of words. Optimal relevance is obtained with the achievement of mutual manifestness of the cognitive environment between the source text reader and the target text reader with the translator's preservation of communicative clues. The two versions of Lu Xun's Na Han, one translated by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang with the title ''Call to Arms", the other by the American scholar William Lyell with the title "Diary of a Madman and Other Stories" will be analyzed in two aspects of style, choice of words and rhetorical devices respectively, within this framework.