On E-C News Translation Under The Relevance Theory

Nowadays, the world relies increasingly on various media to communicate. China has contacted more frequently with the West. It is through the international news reports that Chinese people keep track of foreign economic development, the change of international situation, diverse exotic customs and cultures, ecological environment abroad, anecdotes and so forth, therefore, against the background of which, the translation of English news has particular importance.On account of the characteristics of news reports, which are objectivity, timeliness, variety, popularization, etc., combined with the differences in expression, cultural background, news editing, style of report between Chinese and English news, and with the different modes of thinking and expression between English and Chinese, to ensure the effect of news dissemination, a translator, on the one hand, is expected to understand the reporters’communicative intention and conquer all the differences mentioned above so as to make the translation recreate exactly what the source text is trying to convey; on the other, he should give special attention to the change and assessment of cognitive environment of target audience and adopt different translation strategies accordingly to meet the ST author’s intentions with the TT readers’ expectations. So it is clear that E-C news translation is a process of news communication and interpretive use of language, which will inevitably concern some concepts of relevance theory, such as inference and cognitive context.Relevance theory views translation as an ostensive-inferential process, in which translator pursues the optimal relevance by fully contrasting the linguistic-cultural differences between Chinese and English. RT provides a unified theoretical framework for news translation. In this framework, the related notions such as cognitive environment, ostensive-inferential process, relevance, can be applied to account for the translation phenomena in news translation, which contributes to the translator’s overall consideration of the SL author’s communicative intention and the TL reader’s cognitive context so that, while maintaining the fidelity and objectivity of the news, he can adopt different translation methods to make the TL readers obtain maximal relevance by realizing maximum contextual effects with minimum processing effort.Considering the above, this thesis tries to guide the E-C news translation with the Relevance Theory. At first, it has done the reviewing of generality to the related literature of Relevance Theory, Relevance Theory of Translation and studies on news translation, and then discussed the definition, the feature, the criterion and the classification of news. Later, the thesis emphatically introduces some important notions of Relevance Theory and its explanatory power over translation. In the last chapter, it explores the application of RT in E-C news translation, taking English news texts as examples and using an integrated methodology by adopting theoretical and empirical procedures, in order to illuminate that the ultimate and sole goal of translation is to let the TL readers achieve optimal relevance by yielding maximum contextual effects.