On The Translation Of Idioms In Hong Lou Meng From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Relevance Theory appeared in 1986. The founder of Relevance Theory Sperber and Wilson think that communication is a kind of process of ostensive-inference, and both the two parties of communication want to reach optimal relevance. Whether the communication is successful or not will depend on two elements: contextual effects and processing effort. Other things being equal, the more contextual effects derived by the hearer, the more relevance there is between the two parties of communication; equally, other things being equal, the less processing effort paid by the hearer, the more relevance there is between the two parties of communication. In 1991, Sperber and Wilson's student Gutt published his doctoral dissertation named Translation and Relevance. In his dissertation, Gutt uses Relevance Theory to explain some translation texts and some phenomena occurring in translation, and he discusses a new relationship among three participants: the original writer, the translator, and the readers. And Relevance Theory gives us a new way to study translation from a new perspective. Hong Lou Meng (also known as The Dream of the Red Chambe and The Story of the Stone), completed in the mid-eighteenth century by Cao Xueqin, is regarded as one of the greatest novels in China. In this novel, there are a great number of Chinese idioms. They are the crystallization of Chinese culture. They are vivid in imagery and they have stable structures, therefore any arbitrary change in the wording or collocation is usually not permitted. Besides that, many Chinese idioms in Hong Lou Meng contain special Chinese cultural information which can not be easily understood by target language readers.Relevance Theory puts emphasis not only on the original text, but also on the translator's correct understanding of the original writer's communicative intention and on the translator's knowledge of the cognitive environment of the target language readers. In this thesis, the author will try to study the idioms of Hong Lou Meng from the perspective of Relevance Theory. The author of this thesis will study how the translator infers the original writer's communicative intention from the linguistic, the situational and cultural contexts of the original with his knowledge of the cognitive environments of the target language and culture, and how he conveys the communicative intention to the target language readers to make them get adequate contextual effects without spending unnecessary effort. In the process of translation, only if he infers the right intention of the original writer in terms of Relevance Theory and conveys to the target language readers the right intention of the original writer in terms of Relevance Theory, he can use any translation methods.