A Study Of E-C Translation Of Culture- Loaded Words And Expressions From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

This thesis is from the theoretical perspective of Relevance Theory (RT). It is a case study of Yang Bi’s Chinese version of Vanity Fair, aimed at probing into the E-C translation of culture-loaded words and expressions.Culture-loaded words and expressions refer to the items in the source text which convey cultural connotations or associations and the items which can best embody the cultural information carried by language and reflect social life of human beings in the language system. According to Nida, there are five types of culture. The culture-loaded words and expressions in the source text can also be classified into five categories. The five groups cover ecological culture-loaded words and expressions, material culture-loaded words and expressions, social culture-loaded words and expressions, religious culture-loaded words and expressions and linguistic culture-loaded words and expressions. In previous studies, many scholars discuss the translation of culture-loaded words and expressions from such theoretical angles as the interpretative theory, skopos theory and pragmatic equivalence theory, while this thesis is primarily based on RT.RT was put forward by the French scholar Dan Sperber and British scholar Deirdre Wilson. RT is the basis of cognitive linguistics and used to describe the cognitive process of discourse. RT points out ostensive-inferential model in place of traditional code model. Sperber and Wilson hold that communication is intention-oriented. There is informative intention and communicative intention. Informative intention means to make a range of presumptions manifest to the audience, whereas communicative intention means to make the presumptions manifest to both the communicator and audience. Relevance is not an absolute concept and it depends on the two aspects of processing efforts and contextual effects. Most relevance means to obtain the most contextual effects with the fewest processing efforts. Optimal relevance means to achieve enough contextual effects with effective efforts. Most relevance is connected to human being’s cognition while optimal relevance is the goal of communication.Based on the research, as for the translation of the 180 culture-loaded words and expressions, Yang Bi mainly adopts foreignization in the translation of culture-loaded words and expressions. Moreover, Yang Bi uses 4 translation methods in the employment of foreignization which are non-cultural translation, substitution, deletion, and autonomous creation. Yang Bi adopts 3 translation methods in the employment of domestication which include literal translation, literal translation plus intratextual gloss, literal translation plus extratextual gloss. The translator takes a full consideration to the function in the target language (TL) and adopts different methods.