| Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson proposed Relevance Theory in 1986, which regards the verbal communication as an ostensive-inferential process from the perspective of cognition. The core of communication is to find optimal relevance between communicator and audience for understanding the communicating goal. Ernst August Gutt successfully introduced it to translation study. In his view, the process of translation is regarded as an inference process involving two rounds of communications and three parties, the author, translator and audience. Under Ernst August Gutt's theory, the responsibility of translator is to try his best to make the intention of the author meet the expectation of the audience. On the one hand, the translator should understand the intention of the author from the original works; on the other hand, the translator should have knowledge about the cognitive environment of the communicator in order to choose different translation strategies for achieving the optimal relevance of the author and audience.Six Chapters of a Floating Life is rich in content, involving the social system, family ethics, the customs and aesthetic value etc.. Lin Yutang, master of Chinese and English, knew very well about Chinese and Western culture. On the one hand, Lin carefully weighed every word, inferring the communicator's intention and then translated it honestly and flexibly; on the other hand, he took the audiences'cognitive environment in fully consideration, chose the most appropriate expression to translate the communicator's intention.According to Ernst August Gutt's Translation and Relevance Theory, this research will analysis Lin Yutang's Six Chapters of a Floating Life from three aspects: the inference strategy on structural arrangement and semantic coherence, the compensation strategy on differences between Chinese and Western culture as well as the reproduction strategy on how to translate the original text's stylistic feature. |
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