An Analysis Of Turbulence From Culture And Linguistic Perspective

In translation practice, what strategy should be adopted to cope the text with specific linguistic or cultural features? It is a complex problem. Relevance theory, introducing new angles of pragmatics and cognition into the study of translation, provides a new method of this problem. According to relevance theory, translation is a process of double ostensive-inferential communication, in which the translator plays both as a communicator and an audience. translation is not a simple decoding process, but an ostensive-inferential process involved with cognitive contextual effects and processing effort and the optimal relevance will be expected in a translation work. The choice of translation strategy would be based on the translator's accurate assessment of the Target Language reader's cognitive environment.This paper is a tentative research on the application of relevance theory to translation practice. To illustrate the guiding value of relevance-theoretic approach to translation, the translated woke Turbulence of Jia Pingwa's《浮躁》is chosen for case study. By analyzing the strategies by the translator adopt to handle language-specific or cultural-loaded expressions in the translated work, the author draws the conclusion: various translation strategies can be justified in their own right and it is the translator's accurate assessment of the target readers' cognitive environment that more often than not decides the specific translation strategies and means of achieving optimal relevance. The ultimate evaluation for a translation is whether it effectively conveys the original intention and whether it yields optimal relevance in the target readers' cognitive environment, while the means of achieving optimal relevance do not have to be invariable.It is proved in this paper that relevance theory can be applied effectively account for translating literary works. Meanwhile the author hopes the discussion and methods herewith in this paper can, to some extent, shed light on translators in their prospective practice.