A Contrastive Study Of Two English Versions Of Leiyu: A Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Sperber and Wilson put forward the relevance theory in their co-authored bookRelevance: Communication and Cognition in1986. The authors hold that the cognitionof human intends to get the most relevance and the language communication of humanintends to get the optimal relevance. According to relevance theory, everycommunicative activity boasts the assumption or expectation of obtaining the optimalrelevance. A listener always wants to get adequate contextual effect with the leastprocessing effort and infer the intention of the speaker.Gutt proposes the relevance translation theory which applies the relevance theoryinto interpreting translation. In the opinion of Gutt, translation is an inferential processwhich involves brain mechanism and an act of linguistic communication. As a specialform of communication, it contains two layers of communication. The first is thecommunication between the author and the translator. The author is the addresser ofthe source text and the translator is the addressee of the source text. The second is thecommunication between the translator and the target readers. The translator acts as theaddresser of the translated work and the target reader act as the addressees of thetranslated work. The translator, who plays the double roles in the process of translation,is the mediator of information. Although it is a special form of communication,translation still regards the optimal relevance as its principle. It demands the translatorto make a balance between the author’s intention and the expectation of target readers,i.e., the translator is required to seek optimal relevance from the author’s ostentation,which will be delivered to the target readers by the translator.Leiyu, the masterpiece of Mr. Cao Yu, is a milestone of China’s modern dramahistory. It takes the semi-feudal and semi-colonial China as the social background anddepicts a story of the resentment which has lasted for nearly thirty years in two families bursting out on one stormy night. As an excellent literary work, Leiyu not onlypossesses the common features of drama language being simple and brief but also hasits own characteristics, that is, the plots are closely and dramatically arranged andevery role has his or her own special character and the subtexts are abundant. Since itsbirth, the research achievements made on it have greatly surpassed Leiyu itself.This thesis makes a contrastive study of two English versions of Leiyu. The firstEnglish version is Thunder and Rain translated by the famous drama translator, Mr.Yao Xinnong, which was serialized in T’ien H’sia Monthly in1936and1937. Thesecond English version is Thunderstorm translated by the famous scholar, Mr. WangZuoliang (co-translator Archie Barnes), which was published by Foreign LanguagesPress in1958. It is worth making a study of the English translation of Leiyu from theperspective of relevance theory.The thesis adopts two kinds of research approaches. First, the contrastive analysismethod is used in the main body of this thesis. On most occasions, Mr. Yao Xinnongliterally translated Leiyu since he wanted to make the target language readers tounderstand Chinese culture. Mr. Wang Zuoliang and Mr. Barnes combined the literaltranslation and the free translation since they tried to make the translated workresemble the original work and also took the acceptability of target language receptorsinto consideration. It endows the contrastive study with feasibility and meaningfulness.Second, both qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis are used in this thesis.Statistics on word frequency is presented with the help of computer softwareConcordance3.0and ITCCLAS for the purpose of getting a clear perception on howthe translated works try to be relevant to the original work on the lexical level.The thesis falls into six parts.The introduction makes a brief account of research background, researchsignificance, research methodology and the thesis structure.Chapter one presents a literary review of Leiyu and its translation at home andabroad. It also makes an introduction of the author of Leiyu and two translators.Additionally, the background knowledge of the source text and translated works is presented.Chapter Two demonstrates the relevance theory and relevance translation theory.Chapter Three covers the introduction of Leiyu and its two translated works. Italso introduces the lifetimes of Mr. Cao Yu and Mr. Yao Xinnong and Mr. WangZuoliang and Mr. Barnes.Chapter Four is the main body which is about a contrastive analysis of twoEnglish versions of Leiyu from three aspects of cognitive environment: lexicalinformation and logical information and encyclopedic information, with the principleof the optimal relevance.The last part is the conclusion. The present author holds the view that relevancetranslation theory requires the translator to seek the optimal relevance from the authorand to deliver the optimal relevance to the target language receptors. It makes thetranslated work resemble the source text to the most degree and the target languagereceptors can get as much contextual effect as the source language receptors do. As awhole, from the perspective of relevance theory, Yao Xinnong’s version has somedefects since he translated it word by word and failed to take the receptor’sacceptability into consideration; Wang-Barnes’s version can be better accepted by thetarget language receptors since they can get adequate contextual effect with the leastprocessing effort.