A Relevance-theoretical Study Of Literary Translation Criticism

There always exist two inclinations in Chinese translation criticism: to equate translation criticism with error analysis, listing the "unfaithfulness" to the original rigidly; and to give an intuitive impression on the translated text. In comparison to the rapid progress of translation publication and the development of various translation theoretical studies, the inadequacy of theoretical research on translation criticism cannot meet the requirement of new circumstance. Thus, to establish a new and organic system will be of importance to the standardization of translation criticism and will be benefit to the effective quality control. This thesis attempts, in light of relevance theory and E. A. Gutt's relevance theoretical account of translation, to discuss the feasibility of applying this theory to literary translation criticism.According to relevance translation theory, translation falls under the interpretive use of language and it is also regarded as a verbal communication. Belonging to the interpretive use of language, translation is naturally required to be faithful to the original meaning, on one hand; as a verbal communication, it is required to achieve the optimal relevance between the utterances, on the other hand. Hence, the requirement for the resemblance and that for the optimal relevance are interacted, which leads to the pursuit of the optimal resemblance between the translated text and the original one. Since translation criticism is an evaluation of the translated text, it is therefore an evaluation on the fulfillment of the optimal resemblance.Considering characteristics of English-Chinese translation, the author is to tentatively account for the connotation and procedure of literary translation criticism under the framework of relevance translation theory. By adopting contextual effects and processing effort, the thesis explains the relation between the original writer's intention and the target readers' expectation.This thesis consists of four chapters besides an introduction and a conclusion.