On The Translation Of Culture-loaded Words And Expressions From The Perspective Of Relevance-Adaptation Theory

Mo Yan’s winning of2012Nobel Prize in literature gave many Chinese a big surprise asmost people in China had known little about him and his books before. It is safe to say Mo’scrowning should be attributed to the successful translation of his novels.Apart from the magnificent brutal realism, expressionism, hallucinatory realism andstructuralism that feature Mo’s works, readers are also impressed by the rich culture elementsin them. Mo Yan once said the grass-root cultural elements played a decisive role in theartistic style of his works. So among other topics, the research on the translation of cultureelements, or the culture-loaded words and expressions in particular, becomes justified andmeaningful. It will not only enhance our apprehension of translating those culture-loadedwords and expressions, but help promote Chinese culture into other parts of the world. Thoseculture-bounded terms go far beyond the boundary of linguistics but have multipleimplications in the fields of history, sociology, religion, etiquette and ecology, etc. As a resultof this, translating them has always been so big a challenge for translators to surmount.This thesis tries to study the translation of culture-loaded words and expressions, takingexamples from Mo Yan’s novel 《é…'国》 translated by famous American translator HowardGoldblatt as The Republic of Wine: A Novel in the light of Relevance-Adaptation Theory andits theoretic model on translation process. The theory is a hybrid of the relevance theorycultivated by Sperber and Wilson and the theory of adaptation put forward by Verschueren.Relevance-Adaptation Theory is a cross-cultural and translator’s cognition-centered theoreticframework in which translating is deemed as a cognitive process encompassing arelevance-seeking, ostensive-inferential process and a dynamically-adapting process. In otherwords, translators seek the optimal relevance in the cognitive environment of the source text based on lexical, logical and encyclopedic information, thus make dynamic adaptation intothe cognitive environment of the target readers according to the social-cultural, linguisticcontext and the aesthetic expectations of the readers. In the book of《é…'国》, Mo Yan presentsa large number of culture-loaded words and expressions, either in the utterances of thecharacters or in the narratives. Howard Goldblatt, a renowned translator with decades ofexperience in translating Chinese literature and himself a research topic for scholars, rathersuccessfully bridged the cultural barrier. This essay finds out that his translating principles canalso be described in the light of Relevance-Adaptation Theory.This thesis comprises five chapters. The first chapter is introductory, showing thesignificance, rational, objectives, research methodology and structure of the paper. Chaptertwo is the literature review, which introduces the previous studies on culture and translation,definition, classification and translation of culture-loaded terms, and translation process.Chapter three is the theoretical framework of this paper, detailing the Relevance-AdaptationTheory and its theoretic model on translation process. Chapter four is the principal part of thepaper. It first gives a brief introduction to the novel and the translator, and then tentativelyanalyzes the translation of culture-loaded words and expressions using the theoretical modelderived from the Relevance-Adaptation Theory. The last chapter is the conclusion andimplication of this thesis.The conclusion of the thesis is: Relevance-Adaptation Theory is helpful with thedescription and explanation of the process of translating culture-loaded words and expressions.The translator should go through the process of relevance-seeking and dynamic adaptingbefore producing a successful translation of culture-loaded words and expression. Moreover,through our analysis, we find out the translation principles that Goldblatt stated for himself iscompatible and can correspond with the Relevance-Adaptation Theory’s accounts.The significance of the thesis is: With the rise of China’s economy, the promotion of Chinese culture is undergoing rapid development. In this process, well-qualified translatorswho can successfully transfer and preserve Chinese culture of which culture-loaded wordsand expressions are the fundamental vehicles are badly needed. Relevance-Adaptation Theorycan be applied to the training of translators. On the whole, Howard Goldblatt’s translation ofculture-loaded words and expressions is successful and we need to draw helpful inspirationsfrom it.