On The Explanatory Power Of Relevance Theory For Dialect Translation

Jia Pingwa is a famous Chinese writer who has a strong hometown complex and is keen ondepicting local culture from a new and authentic perspective. The natural and unique Shanbeidialect in his novels plays an irreplaceable role in reconstructing real-life scenario of northShaanxi Province, uncovering the characters’ mental activity and motivating the plots’development and the realization of his writing intention. However, the dialect which isincomparably important for the novels poses a great challenge to translators on the other hand.While previous dialect translation studies more or less have some limitations,Relevance-theoretical account of translation, a translation theory which covers all translationphenomenon under its unified theoretic framework, however, offers us a brand new perspectiveand probably new hope in dialect translation studies.Relevance Theory is a cognitive pragmatics theory proposed by Sperber and Wilson(1986)on the basis of their critical analysis of the traditional communication theory based on code modeor inferential mode and of Grice’s Conversational Cooperative Principle. They redefine thecommunication mode of language and argue that language communication is anostensive-inferential process, and every act of ostension carries a guarantee of relevance. And thecentral claim of Relevance Theory is two principles of relevance, namely First (or Cognitive)principle of relevance—“Human recognition tends to be geared to the maximisation ofrelevance” and Second (or Communicative) principle of relevance—“every act of ostensivecommunication communicates a presumption of its own optimal relevance.” Gutt(2000)introduced Relevance Theory to translation studies as he believes that translation is also anostensive-inferential communication under the guidance of the principle of relevance. Theprinciple of relevance heavily constrains the translation with regard to both what it is intended toconvey and how it is expressed. And the translator has to go through the ostensive-inferentialtwo times. In the first time, the translator should infer what are the context assumptions theoriginal author wants to convey to his readers according to the communicative intention andcognitive context the author manifested; and in the second, the translator should adoptappropriate translation strategy to convey the original author’s communicative intention to targettext readers based on his knowledge of the cognitive context and intended interpretation of thetarget text readers. And Gutt(2000) thereby proposed the concept of direct translation andindirect translation which are not opposite. The choice depends on translator’s communicativeinformation and reader’s expectation. The translator should also seek for equivalence on the relevance-presenting levels and preservation of the degree of relevance between the translationand the original.This thesis conducts a deep analysis on dialect translation based on Relevance Theory. Withexamples extracted from Jia Pingwa’s three novels—Turbulence, The people of Chicken’s NestHollow and The Heavenly Hound, this paper probes into how the relevance that the SL readersget from the original text on semantic level, cultural level and stylistic level can be preserved inthe translation while making sure that the degree of the relevance, namely, the ratio betweencontextual effect and processing effort both SL readers and TL readers get are also equivalent.The conclusions of this thesis are: firstly, Relevance Theory also has great explanatory powertowards dialect translation. Secondly, dialect translation is also a kind of doubleostensive-inferential communicative process, but the first ostensive-inferential process is muchmore important and difficult for dialect translation than for other translation. Thirdly, dialecttranslation can be achieved from semantic level, cultural level and stylistic level with all kinds ofstrategies according to the cognitive environment and the processing efforts readers can afford,so that readers of the translation can achieve the same relevance as readers of the original dowith minimal processing efforts. In theory, this thesis summarizes the limitations of previousdialect translation studies and proves the explanatory power of Relevance Theory, and inpractice, this thesis summarizes several concrete dialect translation strategies on different levelsaccording to different cognitive environment based on examples extracted from three of JiaPingwa’s novels, providing a fairly new theoretic perspective and workable approach to dialecttranslation.