A Brief Analysis Of Characteristics And Translation Of Vague Language In Pride And Prejudice From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Vagueness is an inherent characteristic of language, and it is also a phenomenon existing in human daily communication. The use of vague language can not only express the beauty of artistic conception of language, but also convey the meaning of illocutionary act at the same time. The translation of vague language is an extremely complex verbal communication behavior, and it is closely related to the reasoning process of the brain. The translation of vague language should be based on the cognitive context to infer the vague intention dynamically. Due to the vague characteristics of vague language, vague language’s understanding should draw support from the cognitive context. Therefore, in the process of vague language translation, great importance should be attached to analysing the communicative intention of vague language and inferring the vague intention so as to find the best way to translate.Although relevance theory has been applied widely to the study of translation, there is still few people to apply it to the research of translation of vague language. Based on this, this thesis aims to analyse the vague language of the famous English novel Pride and Prejudice from a new perspective, that is, the perspective of relevance theory. Meanwhile, the thesis also analyses the ostension and inference process of informative intention and communicative intention in vague language translation. In addition, the translation methods of vague language are discussed in this thesis.The thesis is divided into five parts. Chapter one is a general introduction of this research. It mainly introduces the background of the study, purpose of the study and significance of the thesis. Chapter two is literature review. It presents the literature review of relevance theory, including relevance theory study in China and abroad. And it also introduces the literature review of vague language, including vague language study in China and abroad. Chapter three is the theoretical foundation of the study. It mainly states relevance theory and vague language theory, in the meanwhile, illustrates the concept of communication, the concept of context and cooperative principles of relevance theory. Chapter four is the main body of this thesis. Firstly, the writer introduces the property of translation and the process of translation from the perspective of relevance. Then, the writer expounds the impact of ostensive-inferential process and translators’ subjectivity on vague language translation. It indicates that in the communication, the translator’s purpose is to make the author of source text and the readers of target text form optimal relevance and in the meanwhile, enable the readers to understand the source text and context of source text better. What’s more, the most important task is that the writer combines vague language of Pride and Prejudice and analyses their translation concretely from three perspectives of relevance theory, which are the concept of communication, the concept of context and cooperative principle. Then the author discusses the translation methods of vague language. Chapter Five comes to a conclusion. It reveals the findings and limitations of the study, then states the speculations of further study. The writer hopes that the conclusion is beneficial for the further study of the work Pride and Prejudice from new perspectives.Through analysing the translation of vague language of Pride and Prejudice, the author gets the following main findings:1) In the process of human’s practice and cognition, vague language occurs inevitably as a result of people’s understanding of arbitrariness and subjectivity on things and phenomena with transitional state. What’s more, most of them are appearing in dialogues. And the author divides the vague language of Pride and Prejudice into five categories, that is, modal verbs, nouns, pronouns, adjectives and adverbs, quantifiers vague language. In the mean time, the thesis gives many examples to illustrate the vague languages with the help of relevance theory.2) In the process of translation of vague language, translators can adopt some translation methods, that is, literal translation, free translation, amplification and omission to better convey the vague language to the target readers.3) In the process of translation of vague language, translators should comply with the relevance theory to seek the optimal relevance. Then it can make the target readers obtain the greatest contextual effects with the smallest efforts and have a better understanding of the connotation of the source text.