The Application Of Relevance Theory To The Translation Of Cultural-loaded Words

Translation is a connection between language and culture. Entering the21century, themainstream of translation study has shifted from linguistic respective to cultural factors, andthe cross cultural communication has become the subject of translation. Relevance theoryintroduces new angles of Pragmatics and cognition into the study of translation, and throwsnew light on the problem. Translator plays both as a communicator and an audience intranslation. And translation is a process of double ostensive-inferential communication. Theprocess is one of inference and searching for relevance to yield optimal relevance. The choiceof translation strategy would be based on the translator’s assessment of the target languagereader’s cognitive environment.This thesis tried to discuss relevance theory in translation practice. To illustrate theguiding value of relevance theory to translation, the author chooses the translation of DawnBlossoms Plucked at Dusk for case study. By analyzing different strategies that translatorsadopt to handle cultural-loaded words, the author gives the conclusion: various translationstrategies can be justified in their own right; it is the translator’s accurate assessment of thetarget reader’s cognitive environment that more often than not decides the specific translationstrategies and means of achieving optimal relevance. Therefore this thesis aims at arousingtranslators’ awareness of applying relevance theory to translating literary works like DawnBlossoms Plucked at Dusk.In the first chapter, the author offers a theoretical account of relevance theory. Chapter2discusses the applicability of relevance theory to translation. Chapter3introduced theculture-loaded words of Dawn Blossoms Plucked at Dusk. In this chapter, the authordescribed the definition of culture-loaded words and discussed the differences in the angle ofconceptual meanings and associative meanings of culture-loaded words. Chapter4introducedthe translation of allusions and idioms in Dawn Blossoms Plucked at Dusk by Yang Xianyi.The author classified the culture-loaded words of Dawn Blossoms Plucked at Dusk into fivegroups in Chapter5. The author applied relevance theory to analyze the translations in Dawn Blossoms Plucked at Dusk.It can be assumed that the ultimate evaluation for a translation is whether it effectivelyconveys the original intention and whether it yields optimal relevance in the target languagereader’s cognitive environment, while the means of achieving optimal relevance do not haveto be invariable. Meanwhile the author hopes the discussion and methods herewith in thisthesis can, to some extent, shed light on translators in their research.