Relevance Theoretic Analysis Of News Translation Strategies

News has becom e an increasingly im portant part in our daily life in the twenty-first century during which the development of information and globalization is quite rapid.As the lar gest country in Asia and the second lar gest economic entity in the world,China has attracted great attention from all around the world and has been communicating with other countries m ore frequently.In Chinese,there is an old saying goes as follows“知己知彼,百战不殆”,which means only if we know ourselves as well as our enemies,can we de feat others and win the gam e.It is the same with the developm ent of our country.That is,only if we deepen our understanding of other countries in the world,can we strengthen our power and consolidate our statu s in the world;equally importantly,we also need to let other countries have a better understanding of our development so as to facilitate communication and promote a“win-win”situ ation.Therefore,the news translation between Chinese and English is indispensable in the background of globalization.Despite the importance of news and its tr anslation, the discussion of translation theory has never come to a conclusion. Various translation theories have come up but none of them can be of no defects. The newly founded relevance theory put forward by Sperber and Wilson has provided the translation practice with a new direction and expanded the horizon for translation studies. It is highly reliable that it is beneficial in solving practical problems in translation studies.Relevance theory considers communication as an ostensive-inferential process in which the combination of speaker’s ostensi on and listener’s infe rence are required. The speaker needs to m ake clear of his own inform ation, facilitating the communication process; the listener needs to make reasonable inferences based on the speaker’s ostension so as to understand th e content of communication. In the process of ostension, the speaker should take m any factors in the listener’s cognitive environment(functioning together by listener’s natural factors and cognitive abilities) into consideration, including lexical inform ation, logical inform ation and encyclopedic information, and try his best to provide information consistent with the reader’s cognitive environment; the listener n eeds to m ake inferences based on ostension by utilizing their cognitive envi ronment. In communicatio n process, the speaker should set an optimal relevance be tween his e xpression and cognitive environment, strengthen contextual effects and reduce the processing efforts, thus reaching the optimal communicative effects.Relevance translation theory involves combining the relevance theory and translation research. It states that translation is a cross-cultural interpretive use which involves two rounds of ostensive-inferentia l processes. The first round lies between the source language and translator in wh ich the translator needs to reasonably understand the author’s communicative intentions; the second round happens between the translator and the tar get language reader in which the translator conveys his communicative intentions that he understands to the reader so the reader can have an idea of the author ’s intentions, thus achie ving optimal relevance and finishing the ultimate goal of translation.This thesis is supposed to discuss the translation strategies and methods under the guidance of relevance theo ry with some specific news reports examples sele cted from numerous news reports. In this sense, the explanation of relevance theory and its application to the news translation practice will be the important contents of the thesis. This thesis can be divide d in three parts, nam ely, introduction, m ain body and conclusion, which can be summarized as follows.The first part is intro duction in which the author in troduces the r esearch background of the objects to be discussed, th at is, the news tran slation and relevance theory, including the brief introduction to relevance theory and the research situations both at home and abroad, and the original aspect of the thesis will also be introduced.The second part is the main body of the paper, which consists of three chapters.The first chapter is literature review, which can be divided into three parts. The first part is the introd uction to s ome key notions of relevance theory, including ostensive-inferential communication, cognitive environment and mutual manifestness, optimal relevance. The second part is the in troduction to relevance translation theory, including considering translation as inter-lingual interpretive use and regarding it as a dual ostensive-inferential pr ocess, laying a theoretical foundation for the following discussion. The third part is about the studies on news, paving way for the following part by comparing the English and Chinese news reports to com e up with their common features and differences.The second chapter is the disc ussion of the specific tran slation strategies in the dual ostensive-inferential process of transl ation. Relevance translation theory regards translation as a dual ostensive-inferential process, in which the translator functions as the intermediary and bridge. By the analysis of the translation strategies in the specific news reports, it is demonstrat ed that translator first needs to correctly infer original author’s intentions in the first round of ostensive-inferential process; then he needs to adopt some proper translation strategies if necessary such as adaptation and rewriting, so as to reach the goal of helping readers utilize the least processing efforts to obtain the most contextual effects. In adopting the translation strategies, it is of necessity to pay attention to the influence of reader ’s cognitive environm ent, culture and other relative aspects and translate the text in a flexible way.The third chapter mainly discusses the translation strategies from the perspective of observing the optimal relevance principle. By analyzing the specific exam ples of news translation, the thesis has conducted a thorough understanding of the translation strategies in the framework of relevance theory. It is d iscovered that to achieve the optimal relevance, translator needs to adopt some translation strategies like adding or deleting some information. Besides, situations where direct translation method can be used are discussed and it is concluded that both direct and indirect translation can be integrated into the relevance theory. As long as the optimal relevance can be achieved, both methods are feasible.Lastly, in the conclusion part, the major implications and limitations of this thesis will be stated and some suggestions for future improvement will be provided.