On The English-Chinese Translation Of Children's Literature From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Children's literature has a significant effect on children as it creates for them a fantastic spiritual world where they can not only enjoy themselves but also learn some knowledge. Nowadays, the fast development of communications technology and the globalization enable children in the world to share children's literature of different cultures. Children's literature translation holds an important position in this cultural-exchanging process. In terms of academic researches and theoretical constructions, children's literature translation is far from being adequately explored yet. Thus this thesis tries to arouse attention from scholars and professionals and derive some implications for future study.Much discussed and applied in linguistics and also used in translation studies, relevance theory, as a new attempt in translation studies, takes translation as a communication process. According to this theory, translation is a double ostensive-inferential communication process, which involves the interaction between the original author, the translator, and the target language readers. Optimal relevance is a key in relevance theory. The translator should make a judgment on the communicative intention of the author according to phonetic, grammatical, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic clues, and select the proper contextual assumption by correctly recognizing the target language readers' cognitive ability (Meng, 2000, p. 25). In this way, the translated version can provide optimal relevance and the intention of original author can be in line with the expectation of target language readers.This thesis aims at analyzing children's literature translation under the guidance of relevance theory by taking the Chinese translated version of Oscar Wilder's The Happy Prince as a case. This author discusses the role the relevance theory plays in the children's literature translation practice from three aspects: culturally-loaded words, language style and rhetoric devices. Through the detailed analysis of some examples, successful or not, the author leaps to a conclusion that the translator should adopt translation strategies flexibly to achieve optimal relevance in children's literature translation.