A Study Of English Translation Of Chinese Idioms In The Framework Of Relevance Theory

Idioms which reflect the culture of a nation are the creams of a language culture. They mainly reflect the characteristics of a language. Most of the idioms are created by people in the practice and their daily life. They bear the characteristics of independence and stableness. Idiomatic expressions are popular for their brevity, vividness, earthliness and pregnancy in meaning. Hence, it is necessary for us to translate English and Chinese idioms perfectly. Chinese idioms are especially one important part in Chinese language and the translation of Chinese idioms is not an easy thing because of the complication in the style and uniqueness in the culture.The proposal of relevance theory is not to solve the problems in translation at the beginning. Relevance theory is a science studying the scope of human beings’ communication and cognition. Within the framework of relevance theory, translation is an inter-cultural communication, and communication is regarded as an ostensive-inferential process. In the process, the speaker conveys his informative and communicative meaning to the hearer by his ostensive behavior. Then, the hearer understands the speaker’s meaning through the information included in the speaker’s ostensive behavior based on his own cognitive environment. In the ostensive-inferential communication, both the speaker and the hearer take the optimal relevance as their first principle in order to make the communication successful.The application of relevance theory provides a new viewpoint for the analysis of translation theory. Combining relevance theory with translation, Gutt proposed relevance translation theory. In the framework of relevance theory, translation is an ostensive-inferential process on the source language. The translator who determines the success of the translation infers logically according to the original writer’s intention and the target readers’ cognitive context. Thus, the target readers can find out the optimal relevance between the translation and context and comprehend the version correctly. The studies of translation based on relevance theory are the studies on the elements which influence the translator’s decision-making process, on the translator’s role and on the communication between the translator, the original writer and the target readers.Based on the characteristics of the idioms and the translation, the study on English translation of Chinese idioms in the framework of relevance theory provides a new perspective for the studies on English translation of Chinese idioms. The purpose of this thesis is, on the one hand, to provide an ontological and methodological study of the relevance-theoretic account of translating Chinese idioms into English in specific, and on the other hand is to offer several translation methods for English translation of Chinese idioms in the framework of relevance theory.