On The Trnslaion Of Associative Meanings Of Culturally-loaded Works By Applying Relevance-Adaptation Model

As a kind of communication achieved by encoding and decoding information, translation needs support from linguistic theories, among which Relevance Theory and Adaptation Theory contribute much more than others with their strong explanatory power. In spite of their contribution to pragmatic research, neither of them alone can give a convincing and satisfactory explanation for the process of translation. Therefore, Relevance-Adaptation Model,as a more comprehensive one of communication,is developed and accepted.Relevance-Adaptation Model lays the foundation of the theoretical framework for this paper. The Relevance-Adaptation Model is based on the combination of Sperber's and Wilson's Relevance Theory and Verschueren's Adaptation Theory. It is a new cross-cultural and translator-centered model. According to this model, translation is a dual communicative process. In other words, translation is an ostensive-inferential process seeking for relevance in the original cognitive environment as well as a dynamic process making adaptation in the target cognitive environment. As the mediator in this process, the translator takes on the role of the writer and the reader. Firstly, he needs to communicate with the original author and interpret the original author's communicative intention according to the context to achieve the optimal relevance. Then he starts his communication with the intended reader. Due to the different cognitive environment, the translator is supposed to take cultural elements into consideration, making appropriate strategies to ensure the reader can obtain adequate contextual effects without making unnecessary processing effort. Meanwhile, the target reader's aesthetic expectations and acceptability levels should also be considered by the translator to achieve the optimal relevance.This paper is a qualitative research aiming at exploring the translation of associative meanings under the framework of Relevance-Adaptation Model. At the beginning, the main content and objective comment concerning this model are listed as well as its explanatory power in translation. Then, the author studies the categories and contrastive forms of associative meanings between English and Chinese. After that the author provides adequate example analysis to illustrate the mutual relationship among the original author, the translator and the target reader under the framework of the Relevance-adaptation Model. Meanwhile, some major factors leading to the differences and the translator's adaptation to them are also touched on. Based on these analyses, the research finally ends with some appropriate strategies provided for the translation of associative meanings.By comparing associative meanings in English and Chinese, it can be found out that associative meanings between the two languages have both similarities and differences. There differences lie in the cultural factors including natural environment, aesthetic value, history background and religious beliefs. The analysis of examples related to associative meanings from literary works proves that Relevance-Adaptation Model does have a reasonable and strong explanatory power to probe into the translator's cognition in translation. The application of this model further presents how the translator'mental faculty works so as to better understand cross-cultural communication. This study also helps realize the essence of human communication, revealing human's intuition of language use, which enables the author finally works out some effective and feasible translating strategies in the later part of the paper.