The Conveying Of Culturally-loaded Words In C-E Literary Translation

Under the perspective of the relevance-theoretic account of translation and on the principle of that translation is translating the meaning of the original, the present thesis, through a comparative study between some samples from the translated English novel Turbulence with its original Chinese novel Fu Zao as an example for translating culturally-loaded words in literary translation with respect to cultural translation of local literature, assumes that no matter how domestication and foreignization or literal translating and free translating are defined, they are source-text-oriented translation terms used for the same purpose of aiming at producing and creating faithful translation theoretically and practically. Domestication and foreignization should not be equated with literal translating and free translating for the former mainly concerns with literary strategy and cultural ideology while the latter basically focuses on the methods and techniques in translation considering the principal aspect of cross-language conveying. According to relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson,1986:54), the crucial mental faculty that enables human beings to communicate with one another is the ability to draw inferences from people's behavior, in terms of relevance principle, every act of ostensive communication communicates the presumption of its own optimal relevance. Thus, the communicator's task is to produce a stimulus-verbal or otherwise-from which the audience can infer what he 'means', or, in the terms of relevance theory, what his informative intention is. As the relevance-theoretic account taking translation as an act of communication between translator and target audience only, so, for the target audience, the translator is the communicator whose task is to have the communicator's informative intention recognized by the audience and to ensure that the receptor language text she comes up with "...is the most relevant [ostensive stimulus] the communicator could have used to communicate". As the author of this thesis takes the conception that the translation of culturally-loaded words in literary translation is an inter-cultural communication, the evaluation of all the samples from the translated English novel Turbulence with its original Chinese novel Fu Zao are handled under the guidance of the theory of cross-cultural communication and the framework of relevance theory attempting to explain the phenomenon of translating culturally-loaded words in literary translation with domestication and foreignization as strategies and literal translating and free translating as methods or techniques for the hope of offering any theoretic support for the phenomenon of relevance theory as an explanatory accounts to translation, and at the same time shedding some lights on the translation of culturally-loaded words in literary translation.The outline of the thesis is shown as follows:In section one of chapter one, the study of culturally-loaded words in literary translation is analyzed and the concept that the translation of culturally-loaded words in literary translation as the core of literary translation is put forward. And the importance of culturally-loaded words in literary translation is illustrated. In the second section, the sample and research methodology used in the thesis are introduced while the objective and significance of the study are stated in the third section.Chapter two is literature review, in which the previous studies on relevance theory both at home and abroad are introduced in detail. Besides, four terms of translation strategies and techniques "domestication and "foreignization" as strategies and "literal translating and free translating" as translation techniques both at home and abroad are introduced as well.Chapter three offers the theoretic support for the thesis. The main conception of relevance theory is introduced briefly and the essence of translation under the framework of relevance theory is illustrated.Chapter four is the case study of this thesis in which some comparative analyses have been made between some translated samples of culturally-loaded words taken from the translated English novel Turbulence with its Chinese version Fu Zao as examples to exemplify the translation phenomenon that Turbulence is accepted as a source language text faithful-oriented version of translated English fiction although domestication and foreignization as strategies are used in parallel with literal translating and free translating as translation techniques from the beginning to the end. From the translating of culturally-loaded words in Turbulence as literary translation, the faithful-orientation phenomenon of four translation techniques employed in the translation of culturally-loaded words in literary translation are summarized from the perspective of relevance theory:transliteration, literal translation, free translation and zero translation are divided under three translation strategies:domestication, foreignization, and the combination of domestication and foreignization.Chapter five serves as a conclusion of the thesis which draws out some of the main points and purpose of this study.