Metaphor And Its Translation Strategies In Hawkes' Version Of The Story Of The Stone-From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Sperber and Wilson proposed relevance theory in 1986. Relevance theory concerns the nature and the process of human verbal communication. Based on the traditional understanding that communication is simply an encoding and decoding process or inferring process, they put forward the idea that communication process is an ostensive-inferential process, that is, every speech can be interpreted against a huge range of contextual assumptions, warranting a wide range of interpretations, but not all the possible interpretations are equally accessible to the audience. The audience is guided by something to the communicator-intended interpretation. What guides the audience in interpretation and understanding is relevance, that is, the audience only pays attention to what is the most relevant. If other things are equal, an assumption that can offer greater contextual effects is more relevant and an assumption that requires a smaller processing effort is more relevant. Relevance theory claims that human communication is characterized by the search for optimal relevance, that is, to achieve adequate contextual effect without unnecessary processing effort.Relevance theory is powerful to account for translation phenomena. According to Gutt, translating process consists of two ostensive-inferential processes, in which the translator plays a double role of both the audience and the communicator. In the first process, the audience needs to recognize the optimal relevance conveyed by the original writer and understand the original text correctly. In the second process, he becomes a communicator and should express his understanding to the target readers in the way that is optimally relevant to them. The first step for the translator is to make efforts to find out the optimal relevant information, and then convey it to his readers, and in this process, it is also based on the optimal relevance. Clearly, in each process, optimal relevance is the principle of successful communication.Since Aristotle's time, the metaphor has been a hot subject researched by many scholars. In this thesis, metaphor is still studied as a rhetoric device. Viewed from the relevance theory, metaphor is considered to be the result of loose use of language in searching for optimal relevance. Based on relevance theory, this thesis explores the metaphoric translation strategies in The Story of the Stone from two parts: linguistic level and cultural level. Hawkes chooses two translation strategies, namely, literal translation and free translation. If the corresponding images of metaphor in original novel can be found in target language, literal translation is acceptable. Otherwise, free translation such as addition, substitution and interpretation in the text should be adopted. The study indicates that when dealing with the translation of metaphor, the translator should first recognize metaphor and then based on the pre-knowledge, he may propose many hypotheses. On the bases of the correct understanding of informative and communicative intention of the original author and cognitive environment of the TL readers and optimal relevance, he should decide which strategies he would choose. No matter what method is used, retaining metaphoric images or substituting them, literal translation or free translation, as long as it complies with the relevance theory, and abides by the optimal relevance, it is an efficient one.