A Comparative Study Of Two Chinese Versions Of The Old Man And The Sea: A Perspective Of Relevance Theory

As one of Heminway’s representative works, The Old Man and the Sea ischaracterized by its language which is simple and vigorous with rich implicatures.Since The Old Man and the Sea was published, there appeared a lot of translations inChina. Wu Lao’s and Song Biyun’s translation appeared in the1980s. Among those,Mr. Wu’s translation is popular with the readers in mainland China. His translationkeeps a lot of information of the source text. By contrast, Song Biyun’s translation,the first one in Tai Wan, reproduces more simple style of the source text than theinformation of the source text. Therefore, the two translations are studied here. Withlots of translations gradually appearing in China, the study of The Old Man and theSea has been done vigorously in China. So far quite a few researches have beenconducted on the translations of The Old Man and the Sea from wide theoreticalperspectives. And most of them are done about stylistics, aesthetics, philosophy andpsychology. However, this thesis will compare and analyze the two translations fromthe perspective of relevance theory.In translation, the translator acts as a bond between the two roundcommunications. He acts not only as the audience but also as the communicator. Themain task of the translator is to pursuit optimal relevance between the source text andthe target text. In translation, the translator makes his own contextual assumptions. Atthe same time, the translator properly modifies the context to search for the optimalrelevance and then optimally conveys his understanding of the source text to hisaudience.In the light of the relevance theory, combined with the features of the twotranslations, this thesis attempts to compare and analyze the two translations in theaspects of words, cohesion, rhetorical device and culture by typical examples. Different cognitive environment and secondary communicative environment causedifferent contextual assumptions the translators make. And the different contextualassumptions result in different interpretations. Ms. Song and Mr. Wu adopt differentmethods to pursuit optimal relevance. Influenced by the no determinacy and opennessof the meaning itself and the differences of the cognitive context of readers and thesource language and target language in culture and language, direct translation orindirect translation has its own limitations. But both of them are in the pursuit oftarget text with optimal relevance in line with the source text. Therefore, the optimalrelevance of translation will be influenced by the limitations of direct translation andindirect translation.