A Study Of Translation Of Common Sayings In Yang Xianyi’s Selected Chinese Stories Of The Song And Ming Dynasties From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Story-telling is originally a kind of folk performing art prevailing in the Song dynasty.Later, the subjects for such verbal performance were recorded into the written words called as“script for story-telling” or "vernacular novel". It was only used to refer to vernacularhistorical novels in the Yuan dynasty, and covered all kinds of vernacular novels in the Mingand Qing dynasties. Regarding the citizens as the main reading public, it usually reflects upsand downs or joys and sorrows of ordinary people’s life in plain words and displays a uniquecivic spirit with a great literary and artistic value.Selected Chinese Stories of the Song and Ming Dynasties was extracted from20storiesin Sanyan Erpai and translated by the famous translators Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang.Sanyan Erpai is characterized as popularity by using common sayings, which can reflect thereal life, human attitudes, folk culture and the thoughts and feelings of the people. So far,Sanyan Erpai is given more attention in the academic circle and its English version is furtherstudied. However, little research is done to study the translation of its common sayings.A correct understanding and interpretation of Chinese culture-loaded common sayingsdesigned to reproduce a concentrated and colorful citizen world in the translation isdetermined by the translator’s reasoning the real meanings of Chinese common sayingsaccording to the specific context. Due to differences in social, cultural and personalexperience, the original author, the translator and the TL readers form their own cognitivecontexts. In fact, the nature of translation is cognitive-reasoning process in which thetranslator finds the optimal relevance for translation in three different cognitive contexts. Thisthesis analyzes the translation of common sayings in Selected Chinese Stories of the Song andMing Dynasties and discusses the translation strategies for common sayings to achieveoptimal relevance with literature works from the perspective of relevance theory.The thesis consists of six main parts. The first part is an introduction which includes theresearch background, significance and objectives of the thesis and the thesis structure. Thesecond part is a sketchy review of common sayings translation studies in the west and in China.The third part is the theoretical foundation of the thesis, which introduces some core conceptsof relevance theory and analyses the translation from the perspective of relevance theory. Thefourth part explains the definition, features and classification of common sayings in SelectedChinese Stories of the Song and Ming Dynasties. The fifth part is main body. It discusses thetranslation strategies of common sayings in Selected Chinese Stories of the Song and MingDynasties from the perspective of relevance theory. The translator can make choices betweenregular equivalence strategies (the equivalence of physical images of common sayings, theequivalence of connotations of common sayings and the equivalence of structure of commonsayings) and flexible compensation strategies (substituting, interpretating, adding and omitting)to achieve the optimal relevant translation with communicative intentions of the original textand to ensure to TL readers the best original contextual effects with the least effort. The sixthpart is the conclusion which summaries the new findings and the limitation of this thesis andgives some suggestions on further study for perfecting the theory.