A Relevance-theoretic Approach To The Cultural Image In Literary Translation

Relevance theory, though not mean for translation but proposed as a foundation for cognitive science, is a powerful way to account for translation as inter-cultural communication. Its application provides translation studies with a new perspective. In light of relevance theory, translation is primarily an ostensive-inferential verbal (intralingual or interlingual) interpretation. The translated text is a product of the interaction between original author, the translator and the receptor-language audience in specific communication situations.The images, the cream of the culture, peculiar to one culture often carry deep and wide cultural connotations, reflecting the nation's value, thought pattern and social life, The cultural image, has strong historical and cultural flavors. Cultural image is the embodiments of wisdom and historical cultures of varied nations, which gradually formulate a type of cultural symbols that have comparatively stable and distinctive cultural implicatures. The study of cultural image indicates that it is not only a linguistic and literary phenomenon, but also a cognitive phenomenon and the absorption and transformation of the texts. Based on it, the author tries to analyze how the translators transfer the cultural image under the relevance-theoretical framework so as to confirm powerful explanatory power and the advantages of RT.It divides into five chapters. Chapter one is an introduction to this thesis. In the second chapter, it introduces culture and cultural images, including the relationship between language, translation and culture, the definition and performance of cultural image. As is known, cultural images are closely related to cultural backgrounds and history, thus different readers have different understandings for the same images, and so cultural images have fuzziness. It also mentions the classification of the cultural image such as ecological cultural images, material cultural images, social and religious cultural image, and linguistic cultural images. Chapter three is devoted to the general review of relevance theory and translation. Theoretical enlightenment is included. Chapter four firstly points out the cause of different cultural images, and then put forward the two translation principles to cultural discrepancies, namely, the foreignization and the domestication, which affect the translator's way of dealing with culture. The translator should adopt a flexible attitude in translating to achieve the purpose of translation. Due to the cultural communication and the tendency of globalization, foreignization should be considered firstly. At last, it point out the target for translator's cognition is to achieve the optimal relevance. Chapter five is devoted to the analysis the cultural image on the linguistic and social-cultural level from the perspective of RT. Meanwhile, we discuss the role of the translators.In the last chapter, conclusion and the limitations and suggestions for further studies are included.