The Children's Literature Translation From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Children's literature translation is a special yet ignored branch of literature translation studies for its special readership. Because of the unique characteristics of cognition and linguistic ability of children plus gaped cultural distance, the children's literature translation poses a great and inevitable challenge to translators. This paper attempts to adopt Relevance Theory to guide the analysis of children's literature translation. Through the analysis of several famous modern fantasies with profound examples of success or failure, the author categorized some feasible strategies on the translator's part to ensure successful communication from the perspective of relevance theory.Sperber and Wilson assume that people have intuitions of relevance. There is no exception to our young reader. An utterance is optimally relevant (1) when it enables the audience to find the meaning intended by the speaker without unnecessary efforts and (2) when that intended meaning is worth the audience's effort or in other words it can provide the adequate contextual effects to the occasion. Thus contextual effects and processing efforts are the criteria to decide whether a translation is relevant or not. Therefore, the author proposes that in order to achieve optimal relevance, the translator should make his translation relevant enough to be worth processing while it is compatible with the young readers' abilities and preferences with an eye to their cognitive environment and expectation to make sure a successful communication involved three parties.