A Pragmatic Study Of Modern Chinese Prose Translation

China boasts a profound tradition of the prose writing, and the achievements in the prose writing are no less than poetry. However, the research of the prose translation in the Chinese translation field is far from deep and wide since prose is too general a concept and includes too many forms of writings. So far, there is no monograph for the modern Chinese prose translation and those related to this topic are also rare, and even fewer people have done research from the perspective of the cognitive pragmatics. Therefore, we can say that the research on the prose translation has been lagging behind other literary genres.Prose is an important literary genre juxtaposed with poetry, novel and drama, which has a history of thousands of years in China. The modern Chinese prose refers to the prose after the May Fourth Movement when the vernacular was getting popular. Professor Zhang Peiji has long-term been committed to the modern Chinese prose translation, and made a great contribution to the modern Chinese prose translation theory and practice. His masterpiece Selected Modern Chinese Essays is highly praised and respected in the translation community, which provides a good reference for the modern Chinese prose translation. Therefore, it is worthwhile to have an in-depth study of it.Relevance theory provides a new perspective for the study of the literature translation. It regards the language communication as a psychological cognitive activity, which involves two modes:the code mode and the inferential mode. In the process of communication, the ostensive-inferential process is the basis and the coding-decoding process is affiliated to it. Translation is a communicative activity between the original author, the translator and the target-language reader. The translator’s responsibility is to endeavor to make the original author’s intention and the target reader’s expectation meet. The optimal relevance is the goal that the translator strives for and is also the principle for the translation study.The author of this thesis intends to apply four key concepts of Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory as the theoretical basis to the study of three volumes of Selected Modern Chinese Essays from the lexical, syntactical, and textual levels.This thesis provides a relevance-theory perspective of the study of the modern Chinese prose translation, which is a meaningful attempt. At the meanwhile, it also tries to prove that the operability of relevance theory in the study of the modern Chinese prose translation and its significance in the study of the prose translation. The author of this thesis hopes that this thesis has some reference to the theory and practice of the modern Chinese prose translation.