Relevance Perspective: The Reconstruction For Cultural Default In Chiniese Classical Drama Translation

In the relevance-theoretic framework, translation is an act of communication carried out between two cultures with language as the medium. Relevance theory, a theory derived from cognitive pragmatics, holds that translation is not only for translating the meaning, but also for offering a better cognitive environment, which involves the cognitive participation by three parts: the author, the translator, and the target reader. It does not care for word equivalence, or argue about the advantages or disadvantages of literal translation or free translation, but lays much more emphasis on the equivalence of function. In other words, the translation text should gain the similar communicative effects to that of the original text. Therefore, in the process of translation, there should be an interaction among the three parts: the intention of the author, target language reader's cognitive environment and the translator's strategies for translation, all in reciprocity.Where there is communication, there is relevance; while where there is relevance, there is default phenomenon. Cultural default is defined as the absence of relevant cultural background knowledge shared by the author and his intended reader, and is a culture-specific communication phenomenon which reflects a nation's special lifestyle accumulated in a long history. However, the cognitive environment of the original writer and that of the target reader may be different, in which, therefore, the vacuum of sense occurs, thus the cultural default comes out, which often results in misreading or incoherent understanding necessarily in original language comprehension during cross-cultural communication.As an important part of world cultural heritage and one of the three peaks in the world drama history, Chinese classical drama presents a splendid culture and abounds in performance. Drama translation is a vital means in cross-cultural communication. Viewing from relevance theory, drama translation is actually a transformation of cognitive environment. For a successful cross-cultural communication, the drama translators should care how much of the drama writer's cognitive environment should be shared with the target audience. Therefore the translators should be aware of their functions during the cross-cultural communication by adopting necessary strategies for coherence in target language, so as to let the target language audience have a correct comprehension of the play. From this we can see that relevance theory, with cognition and communication as its core, powerfully sheds light on reconstruction for cultural default of drama translation.In this paper, the author ventures to apply the relevance theory into drama translation and sets optimal relevance as the ultimate goal of translating drama. With Xu Yuanchong's translation masterpiece of Romance of the Western Bower as a case study, this paper attempts to discuss reconstruction for cultural default in Classical drama translation from the perspective of relevance theory, and tries to make a conclusion from the research, and what's more, to find some strategies to reconstruct the cultural defaults in drama translation with the approach of optimal relevance.This paper falls into five parts as follows.In the introduction, a brief review is made on the latest development in translation studies and studies influence. Relevance theory is regarded as a cognition-focused communicative theory while cultural default deals by nature with the cognition and psychology in communication, the author holds that relevance theory can offer an explanation and interpretation effectively for cultural default and its reconstruction in translation.Chapter one begins with a discussion on the theoretic framework of this paper, giving a brief introduction about relevance theory and its application to translation and cultural default. This chapter focuses on the concept that translation is an act of communication and ostensive-inferential cognitive process, in which the cultural default phenomena will unavoidably occur, stressing that only the strategies in accordance with optimal relevance can work well in translation. Chapter two makes a discussion on Chinese classical drama. The author first discusses on a macro-level the nature, elements and structure, and types of drama, and then goes deeply into the origin, development, status and influence of Chinese classical drama. At last, some cultural features in Chinese classical drama are analyzed with the focus on the cultures endowed by Confucianism and religions.Dram translation belongs to literature translation in which cultural default phenomena frequently occur. Therefore, at the beginning of chapter three, the cultural default and its reconstruction strategies for drama translation under RT are discussed. And it analyzes the specific types of cultural default occurred in drama translation.Chapter four is the theme of the whole paper. With Xu Yuanchong's translation masterpiece of famous Chinese classical drama Romance of the Western Bower as the case study, the author illustrates in detail how to apply the strategies in reconstruction for cultural default under relevance theory and analyzes in details in this chapter. In this chapter, based on Professor Xu's successful translation of Romance, the author makes an analysis of how to apply respectively the foreignization and domestication to the Chinese classical drama translation. Some other factors determining the reconstruction are also dealt with in this chapter.A conclusion is made in the last part. The author points out that relevance theory is justified for explaining the cultural default phenomena and offering approximate strategies for reconstruction in Chinese classical drama translation.