On The Translation Of English Idioms From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Idioms are closely related to people's daily life, cultural development and dissemination. Therefore, there are lots of idioms in each language. The idiom is rich in cultural meanings, which makes human language vivid and colorful. For this reason, many scholars and professors attach great importance to idioms, especially the scholars of studying comparison and translation of idioms. They made fruitful researches about idioms from different aspects, including from the view of relevance theory. This paper intends to study idioms from the cognitive pragmatics point of view, on the basis of the cognitive environment, context, and the theories of optimal relevance of relevance theory. The study include the connotation meaning of idioms, the effects of context to the communication of idioms and translation of idioms between English and Chinese. The purpose of this thesis is providing a new road to the understanding and translation of English idioms.This thesis is based on the relevance theory of Sperber and Wilson, especially the cognitive environment, context, and optimal relevance point of view. The paper firstly analyzes the differences between English and Chinese idioms, and the complexity that caused by these differences during translation processing; then, according to the cognitive environment, context and optimal relevance in relevance theory, the paper focus on the comparison and translation of English-Chinese idioms. The paper is mainly divided into four major chapters, with a total of six chapters including introduction, and conclusion.In chapter one, the author presents a general introduction of researches in idioms, and the purpose of this study and the structure of this paper. The second chapter briefly reviews the comparison and translation of idioms in different stages and the major theories and research methods, as well as the basic theory of this paper, which is the theory of the cognitive environment, context and optimal relevance points of view in relevance theory. Chapter three is the general and brief introduction about English idioms, from its definition of idioms, the features of idioms; and analyzed the comparison between the Chinese and the English idioms and its cultural difference on idiom translation. Chapter four is mainly a brief review of relevance theory, ostensive-inferential communication, context and cognitive environment. And the principle of relevance and optimal relevance and a relevance-based theory of idiom translation are discussed. In chapter five, the author analyzes idiom translation from the point of relevance-theoretic framework, applies the theory to the process of understanding and expression of idiom translation, and summaries strategies of idiom translation. All of these will be beneficial to the study and translation of English idioms. In chapter six, the author gives a conclusion of the main points of this thesis and points out the limitation in this research and the improvement in the current direction...