The Crowdsourcing Translation Study Of Bestsellers

In the past few years, there are many foreign best-selling novels favored by Chinese readers, and an increasing number of Chinese readers read foreign novels. The new novel issued in a foreign country has to undergo a period of translation time before it comes to China. It can be half a month for short, or half a year for long, which is undoubtedly a torment to the readers in China who are eager to read the book. So a new translation model-- crowdsourcing translation emerged as the times require. Crowdsourcing translation openly recruits translators on line and take cooperative work to finish translation. The translators are mainly fans of the book, and they accomplish the translation in a short time with high efficiency, which just caters to the requirements of readers. "Harry Potter" series have been widely sought after by domestic and foreign readers. The seventh installment, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows", is translated by the means of crowdsourcing by Hogwarts Translation Institution within a week. It has a wide range of readers, and has got a good effect.Relevance theory is a cognitive pragmatic theory and it has a strong explanatory power to translation. Relevance Translation Theory believes that translation is a dual ostensive-inferential process among the original author, the translator and the readers. In the first procedure, the original writer fulfills the duty of showing the meaning which must be ostensive, and the translator infer the real meaning of the writer. The same process happened between translators and readers. The key point for translators is the inferential process, and the translator must have enough lexical information, logical information and encyclopedia knowledge. By inference translators get the optimal relevance associated with the original. The purpose of translation is to make the writers’ intentions and readers’ expectations meet. The principle of translation is the equal inference distance principle.Under the guidance of relevance theory, the thesis makes a comparison between the crowdsourcing translation versions and the traditional translation by People’s Literature Publishing House of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows". Relevance theory is a cognitive theory, and has strong guidance for analyzing the intention of the translator and the quality of translation. The paper first gives the application of Relevance Theory in translation, and then analyzes the sketches, linguistic features of the novel and its two translation versions. Then under the guidance of relevance theory the thesis analyzes the two from two aspects, namely linguistics and culture aiming to conclude the characteristics, problems, and solutions of crowdsourcing translations. From the analysis, crowdsourcing translation has little problem in the general plot of the story, but sometimes neglects the context and cannot deal with polysemy, pronoun, and some long and complex sentences’ translation. Neither can they deal with some culture-loaded words due to the limited time and their lack of encyclopedia information. Some pieces of advice are given like the choice of words and the uniformity in crowdsourcing translation. What’s more, the thesis also proves that opposite strategies like direct and indirect translation or domestication and foreignization can be well accounted for and united under the relevance theory.The innovation of this paper is to firstly give a different perspective in analyzing translation. Translation can be well valued through cognitive pragmatic theory—the relevance theory. Secondly the comparison between traditional translation and the crowdsourcing one gives a clear analysis about the drawbacks and advantages of the latter one. It can make contributes to the development of crowdsourcing translation, and can further strengthen the cultural exchanges between China and the west.