The Study Of Metaphor Translation In Fortress Besieged From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

This paper explores the issue of metaphor translation from the perspective of relevance theory.Metaphor, as a language phenomenon, has always been studied by scholars including not only the rhetoricians, but also linguists, cognitive linguists and psychologists. Sperber and Wilson proposed relevance theory in the year of 1986. The relevance theory provides a new way to study metaphor. According to relevance theory, metaphor is a kind of "Loose Talk", it is just an ordinary utterance which requires no special interpretive abilities but extra processing effort. It can be well explained under relevance theory.Relevance theory points out that the nature of translation is an interpretive use of language and, like any other communicative activities, aims at achieving optimal relevance, which allows readers to gain maximum contextual effect with minimum effort.From the perspective of relevance theory, the process of translation consists of two rounds of communications, in which the translator plays a double role of both audience and communicator. When doing the metaphor translation, the translator should first form his own communicative information. Then under the cognitive environments of target readers, he should reconstruct the image of the original metaphor in the way that can ensure optimal relevance. No matter what method is used, as long as it complies with the relevance theory and can ensure the optimal relevance, it is an effective one.The metaphor data are collected from the famous Chinese novel Fortress Besieged and its English version. As the author, Qian Zhongshu, had claimed the honor of an ingenious scholar and intelligent writer since 1940. The success of the masterpiece, to a great extent, can be boiled down to numerous original metaphors in the book.The case study indicates that when doing the metaphor translation, the translators always try to keep the metaphor image unchanged, in an attempt to offer target readers a chance to make processing effort and have contextual effect by themselves as well as introduce Chinese culture to the target readers.