On The Translation Of Culture - Loaded Words From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

On October 11 th, 2012, the Nobel Committee in Sweden announced that the 2012 Nobel Prize in literature goes to Chinese writer, Mo Yan. Thus, Mo Yan has become the first writer in mainland China who was granted for this award. Objectively speaking, Mo Yan’s crowning should be attributed to the successful translation of his works.In addition to the magnificent brutal realism, expressionism, hallucinatory realism and structuralism that feature Mo’s works, readers are also amazed by the rich culture elements between the lines. Mo Yan once said himself that the grass-root cultural elements played the decisive role in his literary creation and even the artistic style of his works [1]. So among all the topics, the research on the translation of culture elements, or the culture-loaded words and expressions in particular, is necessary and quite significant. It will not only inspire the future translators on improving their methods of translating those culture-loaded words and expressions, but also help bring Chinese culture to other parts of the world. Those culture-loaded words go far beyond the boundary of linguistics but have various implications in the fields of history, sociology, religion, etiquette and ecology, etc. As a result, translating them has always been such a big problem for translators to resolve.Relevance-Adaptation Theory is a hybrid of the Relevance Theory put forward by Sperber and Wilson and the Adaptation Theory cultivated by Verschueren. Relevance-Adaptation Theory is a cross-cultural theoretic framework and is centered by translators’ cognition. In this theory, translating is deemed as a cognitive process containing a relevance-seeking, ostensive-inferential process and a dynamically-adapting process. In other words, translators should seek the optimal relevance in the cognitive environment of the source text based on lexical, logical and encyclopedic information, and then make dynamic adaptation into the cognitive environment of the target language according to the social-cultural, linguistic context and the aesthetic expectations of the readers.In the book of Hong Gao Liang Jia Zu, Mo Yan presents a large amount of culture-loaded words and expressions, either in the dialogues of the characters or in the narratives. As a senior translator, Howard Goldblatt has decades of experience in translating Chinese literature especially the works of Mo Yan. His translation can help Mo Yan’s works be accepted and loved by the masses of western readers, so the methods and ideas of his translation are worth our intensive study.This thesis tries to find out how Relevance-Adaptation Theory can be helpful with the description and explanation of the process of translating culture-loaded words and what strategies are adapted by Howard Goldblatt in his translation.