Translation Of Culturally-loaded Words In Call To Arms From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

With the evolving trend of political and economical communication betweendifferent countries, cultural exchanges attract more and more attention in the world.As an important sort of cultural communication, the cultural items in translation havearoused extensive concern. The focus of translation studies has exceeded the range ofsimple linguistic comparison and textual analysis. Because culturally-loaded wordsreflect the unique culture and centuried history of China, they serve as anindispensable carrier for the foreign countries to comprehend Chinese culture andprovide a platform for the transmission of culture. Therefore, properly transferring theconnotations of these words will be beneficial to the promotion of cross-culturalexchanges.Relevance theory (RT) was put forward by Sperber and Wilson in1986. As apragmatic theory describing human communication and cognition, it provides a newperspective for translation studies. According to RT, translation is regarded as anostensive--inferential process, whose goal is to reach optimal relevance--the targethearer gets sufficient effects at the least cost of processing effort, which makes thecommunication go on smoothly.Call To Arms gets extensive concern after its publication. The abundance ofculturally-loaded words in it has become one of the remarkable highlights. Due todifferent cultural backgrounds and thinking mode, some words in the source languagecan not find correspondents from the target language, which will hinder the culturalexchanges. Therefore, how to faithfully render the cultural connotations in the sourcelanguage is particularly important.This thesis attempts to explore the translation of culturally-loaded words in CallTo Arms under the framework of RT. With optimal relevance as the guidance, the thesis will provide some basic strategies for rendering culturally-loaded words. Thisthesis analyzes the treatment of culturally-loaded words in the English version of CallTo Arms and studies how the translators cross cultural barriers and compensatecultural defaults. Finally, the author tentatively puts forward a guiding criteriongoverning the treatment of culturally-loaded words: under different culturalbackground and cognitive environment, translators should pay much attention to thetarget readers’ cognitive ability; translators should choose those translation strategieswhich are favorable for the attainment of optimal relevance to make the author’scommunicative intention meet with the target readers’ expectation. To the translationof culturally-loaded words in Call To Arms, translators should choose propertranslation strategies to compensate cultural defaults, cross cultural barrier and realizecross-cultural communication.