Reconstruction Of Context In English-Chinese Literary Translation Based On Relevance Theory

In this thesis, the author tries to explore context and translation from the angle of cognition, in which an effective approach in the translation of literary works is proposed and applied: to reconstruct the context in literary translation on the basis of relevance theory.By analyzing the features and functions of context, the author holds that context is formed in the process of dynamic inference, and it is a psychological construct, a set of assumptions that the communicators have about the world. When we try to comprehend a text, we would have some specified assumptions that form the specified context. As translation is a communication of two ostensive-inferential processes, involving two communicators and two recipients, of whom translator has a double identity, i.e the communicator and the receptor. So in translating, there is a process of translator' s reconstructing of writer-intended context that requires the effort of the target reader to reconstruct it too. What the translator should do is to reconstruct the context during the inferential process, and the context reconstructed is cognitive. The translator reconstructs the context in accordance with the following principle:Relevance = contextual effect /processing effortThus in order for his translation to be of optimal relevance, the translator needs to have a right evaluation of the target reader's cognitive context and to look at the contextual effects and the processing effort involved for the target readers.In order to show how the context reconstruction is conducted, a model is set up. From the analysis of the model, we can find that the relevant contextual assumptions the translator got by activating his own cognitive context in accordance with the relevance principle, from which the writer's linguistic intention and communicative intention can be achieved, comprise the context the translator aims to reconstruct in translation, and it is in the inferring process that the translator reconstructs the context. After evaluating the target reader's cognitive context, the translator employs some strategies to encode the reconstructed context into target language. The thesis consists of four chapters:Chapter One begins with a discussion of the definition, features and functions of...