On The Translation Of Proper Nouns In Classical Chinese Poems-from The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

The thesis explores the relationship between pragmatics and translation by applying pragmatic theory—relevance theory to the English translation of the proper nouns in ancient Chinese poems and lyrics. The purpose is to testify the universality of relevance theory in translation; furthermore, by what ways they can be used respectively and properly. Some Chinese scholars have done some research in the application of the relevance theory in translation. They have proved that the relevance theory can be used in the realm of translation. This thesis tries from a new angle and focuses on the translation of the proper nouns in ancient Chinese poems and lyrics.Relevance Theory (RT) is the most influential pragmatic theory in the western world these years. The key point of RT is the issue of communication and cognition. It emphasizes the effect that the cognitive context has on the inference of the communicator's communication intention. RT considers communication as an ostensive-inferential process and it has the assumption that every ostensive communicative behavior has the optimal relevance, i.e. the audiences can get enough context effect with some proper effort when they try to understand the utterances. And translation is one of the subjects greatly influenced by RT, which considers translation as a communicative process based on cognitive inference. RT properly explains the cognitive problem in translation, such as the intention of the source text writer, the cognitive context of the target text readers and the translation strategies.The proper nouns in classical Chinese poems concern with history, literature, custom, culture, geology and so on. Under the guidance of RT, the translator should deal with the codes according to the source text writer's intention and target text readers'cognitive environment and enable target text readers to find the optimal relevance between the translation text and their context. The translator should get the true understanding of the context effect of the source text according to the inference on the ostensive behavior of the source text writer. Besides, the translator should also transfer the true intention of the source text to the target text readers and enable them to get inference from the target text and have proper context effect. At the same time the translator should choose the proper codes to transfer the true intention according to the target readers'cognitive environment. The translator should have the correct assumption of the target readers'cognitive environment in order to make them recognize the presupposed pragmatic information and find out the optimal relevance between the words and context. Concerning the translation of the proper nouns, the translator should transfer the true intention of the source text writer, especially the communicative intention. When the information intention and the communication intention can't be realized at the same time, the translator should keep the communication intention. The translation strategies that the translators can adopt include transliteration, annotation, paraphrase, contextual amplification, conversion, substitution and omission.