On Fiction Translation From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

The famous German scholar Ernst-August Gutt is the first scholar who applied relevance theory into translation studies. He sees translation as a communicative behavior and studies how to make the unclear information understandable and distinct as well as how to make translation—the communicative behavior between different languages—successful. In the eyes of Gutt, translation is a dual ostensive-inferential communicative process during which the translator plays double roles, and the choices of translation strategies are the process of achieving optimal relevance. From the perspective of the theory, this thesis gives a comparative study of the two English versions of Ah Q Zheng Zhuan written by Chinese writer Lu Xun. The focus of this thesis is on a thorough and detailed study of relevance theory and its application and instructive role to translation practices. This paper aims to prove the applicability of relevance theory to translation studies.Based on the theory, this paper first gives an introduction of relevance theory and some relevant theoretical terms, then illustrates the instructive roles of relevance theory in the study of translation studies and practices, after that, the paper pays great attention to the comparative study of the two versions from the perspective of different strategies adopted by different translators in dealing with particular linguistic and cultural phenomena and their motivation in choosing them. On the basis of detailed and scientific study, the paper makes a conclusion of relevance theory applied to translation for explaining the rationality of different translation strategies and its guidance in translation practices and the limitations of this study are pointed out and some personal immature suggestions of the author for future research are also proposed in this thesis.Based on a great number of linguistic materials, the paper adopts such methods as comparison, statistics, induction and deduction, explanation, and relevant theories of linguistics, which come of the conclusion of the whole paper:optimal relevance is by no means maximal relevance, the focus of optimal relevance is to make target language readers receive similar or the same contextual effects as source language readers do,with similar or the same processing efforts. In order to achieve this, translators can make certain alterations of the original texts to help without rigidly depending on the syntax of the original. The highlight of the theory lies in that it no longer needs to solve such debate as the superiority of literal translation or free translation, as well as domestication or foreignization.The author thinks in translation, the choices of strategies depend on the translator's correct and proper evaluation of the cognitive environments of the original texts. Any translation strategies that can achieve optimal relevance are the right strategies and any translated versions that can help readers achieve enough contextual effects are appropriate translations.