Relevance Theory As Guidance In Retaining Style In Fiction Translation

Fiction is a literary genre that reflects life and expresses feeling through portraying figures, narrating stories and depicting environment. Fictions written by different writers take on distinctly different styles due to authors’ different educational background, personality and life experience. Style is an indispensable part, the soul of fictions. A translated fiction which loses the original style is a failure. Therefore, it is a must for translators to take the style of fictions into consideration. To effectively retain original style in translated fictions is a difficult task for translators, for linguistic and cultural disparity exists between different languages. So how to retain original style in translated fictions to the largest extent while not harming naturalness and fluency is an issue worthy to be researched.The concept of direct translation in the relevance theory can provide some guidance for retaining original style in translated fictions. The concept of direct translation holds that translators should retain the communicative clues of the original text to the largest extent and provide the target language readers with a basically same language context as the source language readers, so as to realize the optimal relevance and keep the original style. This thesis chooses the above concept as guidance, uses a translated excerpt of A Man of Parts as researching material and comes up with several ways to retain original style in translated fictions. The aim of this thesis is to put forward some suggestions and revelations for this field.