Relevance Theory To Metaphor Translation

It is said that there is at least one metaphor in every three sentences in our daily communications.Some people even claim that four metaphors are used per minute in everyday communications.That is why more and more people show great interest in metaphors.Scholars have always studied metaphor as a language phenomenon; classic rhetoricians consider metaphor as a figure of speech.More recently,a series of theories on the explanation of metaphor emerged. Especially,Sperber and Wilson(1986) proposed relevance theory.The relevance theory provides a new way to study metaphor while it interprets communication and cognition.It considers verbal communication as an ostensive-inferential process,which many scholars make full use of,so they can understand metaphor deeply.According to relevance theory, metaphor is a kind of "loose talk",its explications and implicatures are weak,with a wide array of contextual assumptions availed.Especially contextual assumptions and utterance implicatures play an important role in Chinese-English translation,and it enlightens author to study metaphor translation.Few scholars are interested in metaphor translation from this perspective,but it is worth doing research,for the translators can clearly understand the process of metaphor translation and evaluate its quality betterThe author attempts to reproduce contextual assumptions from lexis, logic and background knowledge perspective,in the hope of representing source contextual assumptions.When translators infer the utterance implicatures through the non-demonstrative inferences and emergent structures,they can attain the original implicatures in the metaphor translation.From these strategies,translators can clearly comprehend the process of metaphor translation,and enhance the quality of metaphor translation.The thesis consists of three parts:introduction,the body and conclusion,with the body covering three chapters.The first part is a general introduction.It presents the research background,research objective,thesis structure and research methodology.Chapter one introduces the major contents of relevance theory and explores similarities in the relevance.In addition,it analyzes translation equivalence in relevance.Chapter two attempts to describe relevance reconstruction of contextual assumptions and utterance implicatures in detail,and translators can clearly comprehend the process of metaphor translation,in the hope of enhancing the quality of metaphor translation.Chapter three,we suggest that metaphor translation is not only to search for the equivalence value any more,but also to convey pragmatic equivalent force.Moreover,all the translation strategies are based on the control of relevance theories that have been expounded in the thesis.The third part is the conclusion of the thesis including the major findings of the thesis,some limitations and suggestions for further studies.This thesis attempts to approach metaphor translation from the perspective of relevance theory in the hope of promoting the application of relevance theory to metaphor translation and improving its quality.