An Analysis Of Fairy Tale Translation Through The Optimal Register Of Relevance

Enlightened by Relevance Theory, this thesis intends to analyze translated texts of Andersen's fairy tales. The author, for the first time, tries to derive a formula "Optimal Register of Relevance" and at the same time to clarify the translators' inferential stages for readers.For a long time, the translation of fairy tale poses a great challenge to translators because of the unique characteristic of its special readership plus gaped cultural distance. Therefore, it deserves the most attention from the translators. By employing "hypothesis - testing method" (Babbie, 1992), the author finds out in this thesis that the disputes over all the traditional translation approaches, such as domestication against foreignization, functional equivalence seem to lie in the lack of linguistic knowledge, particularly the pragmatic one. Here translation as an interlingual and intercultural communication, transfers the presumption of its own optimal relevance. Just as Sperber & Wilson mentioned "... every utterance comes with a guarantee of faithfulness... the speaker guarantees that her utterance is a faithful enough interpretation of the thought she wants to communicate" (Sperber & Wilson, 1986: 139).This thesis tests the feasibility of "Optimal Register of Relevance" in the field of fairy tale translation by analyzing Andersen's fairy tales' Chinese versions. In terms of practical significance, new strategies are available and suggestions on translators' self-evaluation are provided. But this does not mean that the present pragmatic approach is perfect itself; it only offers a new point of view in describing the work of translators' mind; it still needs to be adapted in future research.