On C-E Translation Of Shanghai Expo From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

With the development and deepening of China’s reform and opening-up, it is self-evident that external exchange and publicity become more and more important; the Chinese-English translating level of China’s publicity materials may have a direct bearing on the effect and embodiment of the quality of publicity and humanistic environment construction in an area. In the process of translation, if translators ignore the cognitive ability of target language readers and the cultural differences, and make a literal translation of the original texts, a poor publicity effect will be obtained. How to perfect the translation level so as to enhance the publicity’s effect will be focused on in this thesis, which will take Shanghai Expo---the only official magazine of2010Shanghai Expo, as an example to study translation strategies of publicity materials from the perspective of Relevance Theory.The theme of2012Shanghai Expo is "Better city, better life". One of its aims is to promote the exchange and assimilation and mutual understanding of human society. Shanghai Expo, the magazine has played a significant role in informing the world of the information about Expo, and has served as a window through which those nations, organizations and visitors can have better understanding about the whole event and the spirit advocated by human beings. As relevance theory is considered an ostensive-inferential communication, and Shanghai Expo, as a kind of publicity materials, exactly right serves as a means of communication, this thesis tries to make research of some Chinese-English articles in the magazine from the perspective of relevance theory, decide whether relevance theory can interpret the Chinese-English materials by analyzing the translation strategies in Shanghai Expo and study its potential guidance during the C-E translation of publicity materials.Firstly, the paper reviews relevance theory put forward by Sperber and Wilson. The main concepts of this theory involve contextual effect, ostensive-inferential communication, relevance principle and optimal relevance. In the frame work of relevance theory, communication is taken as a verbal ostensive-inferential cognitive process. The key to a successful communication is whether optimal relevance can be reached between the both sides of communication. The optimal relevance refers to "an expectation on the part of the hearer that his attempt at interpretation will yield adequate contextual effects at minimal processing cost."(Gutt,2004:32) Gutt has applied relevance theory to the study of translation, which is regarded as an interlingual and translator-centered communication. Translating process is also an ostensive-inferential cognitive process. The first to be concerned is the communicative intention and cognitive environment of the original writer. Secondly, the translator needs to correctly access the target reader’s aesthetic expectation and cognitive ability, and guided by the principle of relevance theory, he has to strive to make the translated text and the original achieve optimal relevance. In the meanwhile, the adequate contextual effects can be attained by the target readers with minimal processing effort.Then, this thesis analyzes characteristics of publicity materials in China and phenomena of translation of such materials. More than60Chinese-English articles have been picked out for comparative analysis from the magazine Shanghai Expo to summarize translating strategies of these articles. Then, the paper makes a probe into the perspective of relevance theory to see whether these materials can correspond with optimal relevance. First of all, in all these articles, the translated materials of many articles in Chinese are selective, not the whole ones translated. In addition to taking the limited space of pages in magazine into consideration, the translators keep the expectation of target readers in mind and do translation selectively. This is deletion of original text. Secondly, some interpreting sentences have been added to the translated texts during translation, which is addition adopted to make original writer’s intention and target readers’expectation meet with a view to their cognitive ability. Lastly, translators employ edition and recreation to adjust Chinese texts greatly so as to make the translated text concise with a more explicit meaning which coincides with English thinking and expressing patterns. Through above translating strategies, translators have provided a best contextual effect for target readers to achieve optimal relevance between original texts and translated ones.In the end, the thesis further analyzes the above research results from Ihe perspective of relevance theory, and concludes that in Chinese-English texts of the magazine Shanghai Expo, the intention of original writer and the translator can meet the expectation of the target readers who can obtain maximum information that the original writer expect them to get with least processing efforts. Hence, it is explicit that, the strong informative function of publicity materials can help the translators interpret and abstract the information in ST by taking the above translation strategies in accordance with the cognitive ability and expectation of the target readers, and also the translated versions reach the optimal relevance with the original texts by their interlingual interpretive use. In the end, the thesis concludes the potential guidance of RT applied to C-E translation of China’s publicity materials.