On E-C Translation Of Metaphors In Vanity Fair: From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

In light of Relevance Theory proposed by E. Gutt and its application in translationpractice, this thesis, based on a case study of Vanity Fair, accounts for thecognitive-referential process of the translation of metaphor and concludes four methodscommonly adopted in metaphor translation. Relevance Theory has so far provided a newperspective to translation studies in China, viewing translation as a verbal communicationact as well as an ostensive-inferential process of interlingual interpretation. As apragmatical theory with relatively strong explanative power, Relevance Theory can surelybe employed to guide the translation of metaphor. In terms of this perspective, metaphorgives an indirect representation of the speaker’s thought and the translation of it is a specialcommunicative act which must undergo a series of processes of understanding, analyzing,reasoning and finding the corresponding vehicle in the target language. During the process,the translator undertakes pragmatic inference in accordance with the relevance principles,the communicative intention of the author of the source text and the cognitive environmentof readers of the target text, and meanwhile to find the optimal relevance and reconstructthe original metaphor with appropriate translation strategies so as to achieve successfultranslation, namely, readers both of the target text and the source text making the samereaction to the same metaphor.By setting the English novelist Thackeray’s novel Vanity Fair and its two Chineseversions as the research object, this thesis is to address the translation of metaphors withinthe framework of Relevance Theory by probing into the cognitive-inferential process of thetranslators towards the interpretation of metaphors as well as comparing and evaluating thetranslation strategies adopted by the two translators toward the same metaphor. It is hopedthe current thesis will shed some light on the translation of metaphors in English literary works, and make a bit contribution to the translation study of the novel Vanity Fair.