| Today, news has become an indispensable part in our daily life. With the rapid development of economic globalization and the improvement of China’s social status, China has aroused the attention of the countries all over the world. The communication between China and west countries are becoming more and more frequent. Under this situation, news translation is particularly important. With the constant disputes among traditional translation criteria, the criterion for news translation has become very obscure and uncertain. Therefore, the author in this thesis discards the traditional translation theories and adopts relevance theory to guide E-C news translation. The author intends to explain the process of translation with the help of relevance theory and tentatively puts forward viable translation strategies to guide the translation in E-C news translation practice.The characteristics and special purpose of the news is the foundation to looking for a right guiding translation theory, in addition to the difference of culture and language between English and Chinese news. The actual effect of the target text decides whether the translation theory is suitable for news translation.Up to now, researches on relevance theory of translation are in full of swing in the translation theoretical circles in China. Sperber&Wilson first put forward relevance theory, and then it was first used in the practice to explain the translation phenomena by E. A. Gutt. Based on the perspective of the relevance theory, translation is deemed as a communicative activity between languages. The relevance theory is not only relevant to the linguistic codes, but also a dynamic inference according to the dynamic context with relevance as the base. Accordingly, in translation, and intralingual or interlingual communication, relevance is the indispensable part for translators in order to understand the source text, the choice-making process of linguistic codes in translating process. Relevance theory of translation widens people’s horizon and provides a macro-theoretical framework to translation, the value of which has been approved by most of the scholars while others put a different point of view on the explanatory power and applicability of relevance theory.Based on the previous research and relevance itself on Gutt’s translation concepts, the author tries his best to present a more comprehensive explanation of the applicability and limitations of relevance theory in this paper. Besides further recognition of the great explanatory power of the relevance theory to translation, we also have a deeper discussion on the shortages of the theory itself and the limitations of the relevance theory to translation in order to have a comprehensive and dialectical view on the application of relevance theory to translation.Six parts are included in this paper:Chapter I is the introduction. The author shows the necessity and significance of writing this thesis. As a Chinese citizen we can deeply realize that China plays a more and more important role in the international community as a result of the uprising of its national status and the economy. Many countries pay attention to China’s recent situation. As a major economy, we need to know new trend of the foreign economy in order to catch up with the pace of the developed countries. In order to let the Chinese public understand the news of western countries. China must use more talents to translate English into Chinese to avoid the misinterpretation in the international communication. In the process of translation, relevance theory is the guidance which can guide the news translator to find out optimal relevance. In this paper, the author uses a lot of examples to illustrate the importance of the relevance theory in the process of translation. The second part of chapter I is the structure of this thesis. Through this part, we can have a clear view of this paper and the readers can gain as much information as possible with less processing effort.Chapter Ⅱ is literature review. It is well known the21st century is an age of information. And news is main source of information. When you watch TV or read newspaper, broadcast is there. News appears everywhere. It is an indispensable part in our daily life, but most people don’t pay much attention to the news. We often don’t care about whether news are translated from other languages, let alone how they are translated and come into our sight in this way. In the first part, we can have a cursory understanding of several aspects of news, such as the values and the features, characters of news translation and different features of English news and Chinese news, In the second part, we can have a general idea on definition of news translation and features of news translation. The last part is about rationale of relevance theory. Such as ostensive-inferential communication, context and cognitive environment and mutual manifestness. This part makes preparations for news translation from the perspectives of relevance theory.Chapter Ⅲ is the methodology of the study which mainly tell us what method the author uses in order to complete this thesis. Relevance-theoretic approach is the one we truly use in the translation practice.Based on relevance theory is just a theoretical framework which adopted in the study, and the relevance theory, the purpose of news translation will be analyzed, the nature of news translation will be illustrated, the translator’s inferential role in translation will be explored and an RT-based model for translation will be constructed. In today’s translation practice we also adopt exemplification. We need some pieces of news and their translation to support the views of the author. Newspapers and magazines which published in recent years are main source of those examples.Chapter Ⅳ is E-C news translation with relevance theory as framework. The first part is about the relevance and translation. As we have known, a key link for having successful communication is to achieve optimal relevance. Translation as a special kind of communication, must be insured by that principle. Say it in another way, the pursuit of optimal relevance is the step of great concern. There are two kinds of communication involved in the double ostensive-inferential process of translation, namely, the primary communication between the original author and the translator and the secondary communication between the translator and the target audience. So you must choose the optimal relevance twice in the whole process. The process of translation is deemed as an act of communication and an ostensive-inferential communication. The second part is about the effects of relevance in context and in the process of communication. As common people, reading newspaper is a great way to add individual’s knowledge of the world. Translating one language news to another, during this process of translation, individuals of both language users can add their knowledge of the world. For example, during the process of translating English news. The Chinese people add more information of foreign countries. But there is language barrier exists between two languages, because Chinese culture is different from Western culture in many aspects. Due to different cognitive background, even some English news is translated into Chinese, it is also difficult for Chinese people to understand. Because they can not get the appropriate stimuli to get enough contextual effects which leads to unsuccessful communication. We have known that the greater the multiplication effect, the greater the relevance. So the translator should try his utmost effort to enlarge the multiplication effect which contributes to greater relevance in order to let the target readers have a better understanding of the original news. In one news, if there is not enough relevance, this is a painful thing for foreigners to read the news, maybe they fail to get the main idea of the news even they have spend much time and efforts to read. So as a translator, it is a wrong way to translate the English news word by word into Chinese, they should change the way of thinking and take the target reader’s value system into consideration.Chapter V is application of relevance theory to E-C news translation. As we all know that translation can be divided into indirect and direct translation. Before translating news, the translator should understand the news accurately and then decides to choose the indirect translation or direct translation, and finally try to translate them with choosing suitable strategies. This part mainly states the strategies that the author uses in direct translation, such as addition, omission, adaptation and rewriting. Addition means adding information in the process of translation. By doing this, the readers can understand the translated news without spending much process efforts. Contrary to addition, omission means deleting some information. Omission makes the complicated texts easy to understand by taking away details that might hinder the comprehension. Adaptation means that the expression of the source language text is displaced by an expression in the target language that produces the nearly same cognitive effects for the TL reader and that is familial to the TL reader. In the process of translation, the translator may meet this situations which do not allow one to capture all the information of the original text. Under this situation, the translator can choose to translate the news report selectively. The translator makes assumptions of the TL reader’s cognitive environment and decides the potential relevance. According to the special need of the target readers, the translator chooses to translate either completely or selectively. The translator translates the information according to the principle of relevance, if his translation text meets the requirement of the target readers, he has achieved the optimal relevance to the readers and the translated text could be the most relevant interpretation of the original one. By rewriting, the translator can translate the most relevant information to the TL readers. When the target language readers use the same contextual, the translator will choose direct translation. At first, the translator should understand the the original news in the original context and then convey the original contextual assumptions to the target language readers. The translator may use the approach of direct translation in some special cases touching upon the special features of news, such as some news specific expressions, proper names and some rhetorical expression etc. In the last part of this chapter the author analyses the application from lexical, syntactic and discourse levels with lots of examples.The last chapter is conclusion. In this chapter, the defects of this paper are discussed and a summary is made. On the instructive value of the application of relevance theory to translation, a comprehensive and dialectical view should be held. Relevance theory is not a special translational theory in the first place. The main function of the relevance theory is to explain the nature of human communication as a major pragmatic theory. However many linguists and scholars pay more attention to it since its creation. Facts have proved that relevance theory has a strong explanatory power towards the translation. Of course, we have stated in this paper that relevance theory is suitable for the practice of E-C news translation. The nature and the process of E-C news translation can be explained by it. For the whole translation, the study of E-C news translation from the perspective of relevance theory is an exploratory research. It is inevitable that many shortages exist in this thesis in spite of the painstaking efforts made by the author during the research. First, there is no perfect thing in the world, relevance theory is no exception. Second, the examples in this paper is not very good compared with other linguistic study, so the effect of argument would be weakened by that. Third, there is no concrete comparison on linguist, social and cultural differences between Chinese and the foreigner duo to the limit of energy.For further study, the author suggests that such an empirical research should be conducted in order to improve the acceptance of the foreign audience towards the E-C news rendition guided by relevance theory. And in the near future, the study no the E-C news translation from the perspective of relevance theory could be a significant subject which will fill another blank in the current vacant translation studies. |
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