A Study Of Back-translation-From The Perspectives Of The Theories Of Relevance And Intertextuality

Back-translation is often encountered in translation practice and considered as difficult to settle down. With the rapid development of economy and international exchanges, there is a growing need for translation in modern society, and translation quality is becoming more and more a hot concern. The current situation of the quality of translation in publications is not so satisfactory, in which a common problem lies in the process of back-translation. However, the issue of back-translation has attracted little attention of scholars in the field of translation, both in China and elsewhere. This thesis probes into back-translation from the perspective of Chinese and English translation, and intends to bring the study of back-translation to people's attention and to encourage further research on the issue.The present thesis consists of five parts, namely, an introduction, three chapters and a conclusion. The introduction tries to make clear the motivations of the study, the significance of the study, literature review and the structure of the thesis.Chapter 1 explains the concept of back-translation from three aspects: its definition, its essence, and the classification of back-translation. In order to clarify the definition and essence of back-translation, this thesis introduces four terms Source Version, Target Version, Source Original, and Target Original created by Professor Hu Zhaoyun to explain the definition of back-translation. The thesis also introduces a diagram created by Professor Hu Zhaoyun to explain the process of back-translation. With these terms, the thesis defines back-translation as the translating process of the replicating retroversion of the Source Original to the Target Original as the Target Version. Based on this definition, the thesis holds that back-translation in essence is the retroversion to the Target Original and it is also the retroversion to the Target Culture.Chapter 2 tries to build the theoretical framework for the study on back-translation. It introduces the relevance theory and the intertextuality theory into the study of back-translation. The relevance theory was first proposed by Dan Sperber and Dierdre Wilson in 1986. It provides a new cognitive perspective for the study of translation. According to the relevance theory, translation is an act of ostensive-inferential communication. As the core of the relevance theory, optimal relevance is very important in a successful communication. In Sperber & Wilson's eyes, the utterance in a successful communication must be subject to the optimal relevance principle. Seen from the perspective of optimal relevance, in the process of back-translation, the best way to reach optimal relevance is to find the Target Original. The intertextuality theory was presented by Julia Kristeva in the 1960s. Intertextuality is the notion that every text is full of snatches of other texts, which may be explicitly demarcated or merged in. Intertextuality plays an important role in the organization of Source Text. Back-translation is a typical intertext translation. With a brief introduction of the intertextuality theory, this Chapter also classifies the intertextual references in back-translation into two categories: insertion and assimilation.Chapter 3 presents the criteria and operation methods of back-translation from the perspectives of the relevance theory and the intertextuality theory. This Chapter first introduces the current situation of back-translation in publications. There are three types of problems: finding the Target Original but with errors; failure in finding the Target Original; using backward-translation instead of finding the Target Original. The criteria of back-translation, seeing from the perspective of the relevance theory, are closely associated with optimal relevance. As the fundamental criterion of back-translation, "being loyal to the Target Original" obeys the principle of optimal relevance. Based on the framework of recognizing and transferring intertextual references proposed by Hatim & Mason, this Chapter presents three steps for the operation methods of back-translation, namely, identifying the Intertexts, finding the pretexts and finding the Target Original.At the end of the thesis is a conclusion in which the main points of this thesis are summarized and some thoughts on future studies are proposed.