Translating English Elliptical Sentences Into Chinese:a Relevance-Theoretic Account

The pursuit of simplicity, explicitness, economy and efficiency gives rise to extensive use of ellipsis in discourse. According to Relevance Theory’s approach to translation, translators play a dual role as both an author and a reader mediating between the author of the source text and the readers of the target text, they need to make sure both that their interpretation of the source text accords with the expectations of optimal relevance and that translation communicates the presumption of optimal relevance in rendering the source text into the target text. As far as the translation of elliptical discourse is concerned, translators should recover the unsaid information completely and precisely, striving to achieve optimal relevance between the readers’cognitive environment and the discourse; on the other side, they should pay special attention to the cognitive environment of the target readers, adopt appropriate translation strategies, and help target readers yield adequate contextual effects at the cost of commensurate processing effort, thus achieving optimal relevance between the translation and the cognitive environment of the target readers.Taking several typical elliptical sentences in Chapter I&II from What is Man by Mark Twain as cases, this paper focuses on the process of information recovery and translation, and then summarizes the English-Chinese translation strategies of nominal ellipsis, verbal ellipsis, and clausal ellipsis from the perspective of Relevance Theory.