A Study On Chinese Neologism Translation From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Under the accelerated progress of globalization, especially after the accession to the WTO, China becomes more closely related to the outside world than ever before, which leads to the increasing communication and exchange with other countries. And as the reform and opening up going into depth over the past years since1979, dramatic changes have taken place in China with emergence of new inventions, new ideas, new discoveries, and new objects in all fields of social life. It is known to all that language is a mirror of life and any transformation of life will be reflected in language with the demonstration of neologisms.In order to introduce the current status of China to foreigners from different countries, it is in a great urgency to improve the quality of our foreign publicity, especially the translation of Chinese neologisms. Despite the pioneering work done by some scholars and certain achievements made in this important field, Chinese neologism translation is far from satisfaction due to its specific features. Chinese neologisms mainly originate from loanwords which are borrowed from other languages, newly created words and old words with added new senses. As there is, more often than not, no ready-made version for reference, mistranslation of Chinese neologism caused by insufficient understanding of source terms, ignorance of cultural gaps and Chinglish are not uncommon to see.Although Relevance Theory was not put forward for translation study, it has been proved to have strong power to explain translation phenomenon and certainly Chinese neologism translation is of no exception. From the perspective of Relevance Theory, Chinese neologism translation is actually a dual ostensive-inferential process. The task of translators is to seek optimal relevance between the two cognitive environments of the source Chinese neologism writer and target English readers. In other words, they have to make sure that target English readers will get the same contextual effect as Chinese readers without spending unnecessary processing effort in understanding Chinese neologisms.In the hope of helping the painstaking work of Chinese neologism translation, this thesis probes into its research under the guidance of Relevance Theory. Translation methods such as literal translation, paraphrase, back translation, transformation and analogy are put forward in line with particular cognitive environment so as to make original author’s intention meet with target readers’ expectation.