A Study On The Chinese Versions Of Byron’s Don Juan:a Relevance Perspective

This thesis studies the poetry translation from the angle of relevance theory (RT),taking Byron’s long narrative poem Don Juan and its Chinese versions as corpora. RTaims at accounting for human communication, and poetry translation is regarded as across-cultural communication, which is the ternary relation among the source author,the translator as well as the target reader. Byron was one of the outstandingrepresentative poets of English romanticism. His works have great historicalsignificance and artistic value, and most of his poems are still popular today. Thoughthe scholars have made wide researches on Byron’s poems, most of them are from theperspective of literature rather than linguistics. Therefore, this thesis will take Byron’spoem Don Juan as an example, and try to study poetry translation from theperspective of relevance.This thesis firstly analyzes the source author’s two intentions-informativeintention and communicative intention, which are transmitted by the source author’sostensive behavior. When producing an ostensive stimulus, the source author isintending her informative intention and communicative intention to be manifest andmore manifest to her potential audiences, including the translator. The translator,however, has a process of inference to the source text. The translator’s priority task isto infer the source author’s informative intention, and whether the translator capturesthe source author’s informative intention or not is the major factor to judge the qualityof their translated version. The poem Don Juan includes many western culturalallusions, such as those in the Holy Bible, the Greek Mythology, and theShakespeare’s Drama. Therefore, the translator must infer the source author’simplicatures through the process of translation. With respect to the target reader’sinference, it is a process of searching for optimal relevance in translated version. Thetranslator adopts different translation strategies of foreignization principle anddomestication principle according to the source author’s different communicative intentions. The domestication principle renders the target reader with the leastprocessing effort to achieve the greatest contextual effect. While the foreignizationprinciple renders the target reader with justifiable processing effort to achieve thesufficient contextual effect. Although the translated text achieved by foreignizationprinciple appears to be incomprehensible at a time, it may be a successful translationfrom its style. The target reader’s cognitive environment has dynamic features, so thetranslated text that we cannot understand at a time will be better understood some dayonly if the target reader pays more processing efforts. The realization of optimalrelevance in poetry translation can be fully conveyed.This thesis makes a comparative analysis on the two Chinese versions of Byron’sDon Juan, and finds that if the translator can infer the source author’s informativeintention and implicatures correctly, the quality of translated text can meet a higherstandard. Only if the communicative intention of the source text is expressed wrongly,would the translator fail to convey the source author’s informative intention. In thiscase, even if the target reader makes the greatest processing effort, he still cannotachieve any contextual effect at all. This analysis process can be effectively applied topoetry translation criticism. At last, this thesis makes a conclusion that RT has astrong explanatory capability for poetry translation.