On Poetry Translation From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

With the help of relevance theory (hereinafter RT), this thesis tries to probe into Chinese translation of English poetry. RT is firstly put forward by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson in 1986, and it exerts a great influence on pragmatics, and translation studies as well. The most significant outcome is the study of translation from the perspective of relevance by Deirdre Wilson's student Ernst-August Gutt in 1991. Unfortunately, Gutt just focuses his attention on the description of translation theories under RT without the convincing translation examples, especially the poetry translation examples.There are a number of papers discussing translation and relevance by domestic scholars; however, these papers are limited by either the paper space or the theory-oriented approaches. Studies of Keats and his poems have never been stopped by scholars at home and abroad. But these studies are mainly done from the perspective of literature; there is no paper or thesis that studies Keats's poems from the angle of translation. Study of Keats's odes translation has never been done in China, not to mention the study of Chinese translation of Keats's odes abroad. So this thesis tries to study poetry translation under the guidance of RT considering the shortcomings of studies above.The degree of relevance of RT is the main theoretical basis on studying poetry translation. The optimal relevance is the assessing measure between the source language and the target language and the task of a translator is to appropriately transfer the relevance degree of the source poetry into the translated poetry to make sure the closest equivalence between two languages. The author studies the relevance degree between the two languages from the angle of "rhyme", "form", and "information" of the poetry, upon which the author puts forward a descriptive formula describing the relationship between relevance and poetry translation. In order to demonstrate the topic better and more specifically, the author borrows Chinese versions of Keats's odes to exemplify the corresponding relationship between...