An Analysis Of The Translation Strategies Of Culturally-loaded Words In Mommt In Peking From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

With the development of economic globalization, different countries communicatewith each other more and more frequently. Cross-cultural communication has become avery important content in people’s life. As one of the methods for cross-culturalcommunication, translation has become much more important. However, because peoplefrom different countries and regions all have their particular living environments,religious beliefs, traditional customs, life styles, value concepts, and aesthetic tastes,great cultural differences are gradually formed between the countries and regions in thelong process of historical development. A large amount of culturally-loaded words andexpressions are formed because of these factors and bring the translators great troubles.Adopting proper translation strategies to handle such culturally-loaded words andexpressions will contribute to cross-cultural communication.Dr. Lin Yutang wrote Moment in Peking mainly to introduce the traditional Chineseculture to the westerners so that they can have a better understanding of China. The novelcontains a large amount of culturally-loaded words with strong Chinese flavor. Whenrendering the culturally-loaded words in his novel, Dr. Lin considered the culturaldifferences between the two languages, the flavor of the original text, and the receptivityof the readers systematically. He adopted many different translation strategies andproduced many culturally-loaded words and expressions in English successfully.Based on the Relevance Theory, this thesis analyzes the translation strategiesadopted in Moment in Peking for the translation of culturally-loaded words and tries tofind different translation methods to handle different cultural factors. In line withdifferent contexts, different translation methods should be employed so that the optimalrelevance can be achieved finally. Meanwhile, TL readers could obtain the same feelingas the SL readers have when reading the translated text and the traditional cultural flavorcould be retained to the largest extent. According to the analysis of the culturally-loadedwords translation in Moment in Peking, a conclusion could be made: the principle todetermine the means of translation strategy and judge the properness of a translated textis the optimal relevance. And the cognitive environment of target language readersshould be considered at the same time. This thesis consists of an introduction, the main body and a conclusion. The maincontents are as follows:The first part is the introduction, which introduces the development of RelevanceTheory, Translation and Relevance Theory. It also elaborates the current studies on Dr.Lin Yutang’s Moment in Peking, and points out that this thesis studies theculturally-loaded words in Momeng in Peking from a new angle—Relevance Theory.The second part is the main body, which is made up of the following three chapters.Chapter One is a literature review, providing the overview of Relevance Theory,Translation and Relevance Theory, Moment in Peking and Lin Yutang. Relevance Theorywas proposed by Sperber and Wilson based on Grice’s pragmatic theory. In1986, theypublished the book Relevance: Communication and Cognition collaboratively. The basicsof Relevance Theory include ostensive-inferential communication, cognitiveenvironment, context and optimal relevance. Then their student Ernst August Guttapplied Relevance Theory to translation studies and published the book Translation andRelevance: Cognition and Context in1991, which furnishes translation study a new angle.Moment in Peking is one of Dr. Lin Yutang’s representatives, which was a long novelwritten by him in English originally. The novel has a strong Chinese flavour and containsa large amount of culturally-loaded words. The translation of such words has greatinfluence on the readers’ interpretation of the novel and also affects the readability andliterariness of the novel. Since the publication of Moment in Peking, it has manytranslation versions, in which Zhang Zhenyu’s version is the most widely accepted andread. Recently, many scholars have shown great interest in the book. They analyze andremark the book from different perspectives. The thesis regards the writing ofculturally-loaded words by Dr. Lin as a process of C-E translation, and studies thetranslation strategies adopted in Moment in Peking for culturally-loaded words in thelight of Relevance Theory.Chapter Two introduces and analyzes culturally-loaded words from the perspectiveof Relevance Theory. It introduces the definition, classification and formation ofculturally-loaded words in the light of Relevance Theory. Different scholars holddifferent views on the classification of cultural elements. The thesis adopts the oneproposed by Nida, and divides culturally-loaded words into five categories: ecological culturally-loaded words, material culturally-loaded words, social culturally-loaded words,religious culturally-loaded words and linguistic culturally-loaded words.Chapter Three studies the translation of culturally-loaded words in Moment inPeking in terms of Relevance Theory. Firstly, it classifies culturally-loaded words in thenovel into five categories according to Nida’s five cultural categories. The thesis usesfive charts to list different categories of culturally-loaded words in Moment in Peking.Secondly, the thesis adopts the statistic method to make a data analysis of the fivedifferent culturally-loaded words, which can be concluded that there are five commontranslation strategies by Dr. Lin in Moment in Peking. They are transliteration,compositional translation, literal translation, free translation, domestication, foreignationand amplification. Then the thesis analyzes the translation strategies to render theculturally-loaded words from the angle of Relevance Theory. Finally, the thesis examinesand comments on the gains and losses of the translation and the translation strategies ofthe five kinds of culturally-loaded words in Moment in Peking on the basis of RelevanceTheory, and tries to propose a better translation.The last part is the conclusion. It summarizes the whole thesis, and points out thatthe aim of the thesis is to explore the best strategies for culturally-loaded wordstranslation. The thesis intends to explore the translated text which could obtain theoptimal relevance. It points out that according to different contexts, different translationstrategies should be adopted in order to achieve the optimal relevance so that the targetlanguage readers can, to the largest extent, have the same feeling as the source languagereaders do. And the original culture flavour can be retained to the largest extent at thesame time.