A Study On The Optimal Relevance In The Chinese Versions Of Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic And The Spirit Of Capitalism

Social science involves all aspects of human society, including economics, politics, society and so on, the features of which are objective, concise, profound of logicality and so on. Enlightened by Relevance Theory (RT), which is systematically put forward by the French linguist Dan Sperber and the English linguist Deidre Wilson, this thesis intends to analyze the Chinese versions of Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, to study the achievement of optimal relevance in the translations of the key terms "Rationalism'", "Calling", "Asceticism" and "The Book of Sports"According to RT, translation is a kind of communication, an ostensive-inferential communication in essence; and the ultimate goal for translation is to achieve its optimal relevance to the source text, and to be able to match the source text communicator's intention with the target audience's expectation, that is, the audience could get the adequate contextual effects without unnecessary effort. Max Weber's book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, with its classic text, thought density, knowledge content and logicality, every key term, concept or expression is hardly replaceable in the whole logical chain. Thus, misunderstanding of one key term or concept will lead to the blockage or confusion in the comprehensive process. Hence, the optimal relevance between the source text writer's communicative intention and the target reader's cognitive expectation is more important.This thesis consists of five chapters. The first chapter gives an introduction to the theoretical background of the research, the significance and necessity of this research, research methods and thesis structure. Chapter two firstly presents Max Weber's life and his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and a general survey of its English versions and Chinese versions. Chapter three is devoted to the elaboration of the theoretical framework of this research, including the introduction to the fundamental ideas of RT as well as its relationship with translation. The focus of chapter four is to do a very detailed case study from the perspective of RT, about the key terms translation the Chinese versions of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. The last chapter briefly concludes the study, indicating the significance of the study. It further reveals the limitation of the present study and provides some possible suggestions for further research on the topic.