A Relevance-theoretic Approach To The Translation Of Culture-loaded Expressions In Red Sorghum

Red Sorghum is a well-known Chinese novel written by Mo Yan, the2012NobelPrize Winner for Literature, and translated into English by Howard Goldblatt who islong acclaimed as the authority of Chinese literature translation in English-speakingworld. Traditional translation theorists claim that translation is simply an inter-linguisticactivity and translation practice is thus deemed as a mere communicative act, whichfails realizing the importance of cultural information behind words in a successfultranslation. In fact, the biggest challenge in translation is cultural difference, far beyondlinguistic difference. In the communication of different cultures, translation, as thebridge, plays a pivotal role.In recent years, the Relevance Theory, as an important part of cognitive pragmatics,is increasingly employed by linguistic researchers in translation studies. The keyconcept of this theory is relevance that is defined in terms of contextual effects andprocessing efforts. The relation between them can be illustrated as “the greatercontextual effects, the greater relevance; the greater the processing efforts, the smallerrelevance”. From the perspective of Relevance Theory, human communication is aprocess seeking for optimal relevance—achieving adequate contextual effect withoutputting gratuitous processing efforts.This dissertation attempts to make an in-depth analysis of both the Chineseoriginal text and English translation of Red sorghum and aims to explore the translationstrategies to cultural factors in Chinese local novels from the perspective of relevancetheory. According to different cultural factors, this thesis classifies the culture-loadedexpressions in the Chinese original version of Red Sorghum into fivecategories—material, ecological, social, religious and linguistic. Based onrelevance-theoretic translation theory, the author analyzes the English translation ofculture-loaded expressions in Red Sorghum and draws some effective translationprinciples and strategies in dealing with the cultural information.