A Report On The Translation Of Travels With My Aunt (Chapter10-14)

This report, with the translation practice of Travels with My Aunt(1970) written by Henry Graham Greene being source material, does an analysis of novel translation from the perspective of relevance theory. Travels with My Aunt is one of Greene’s representative works, thus it holds a certain translation value. There is no Chinese version currently.With regard to theory, the author selects relevance theory. Relevance theory does an analysis on what is communicated and how to communicate in verbal communication from a cognitive perspective. Relevance theory regards translation as a complicated ostensive-inferential process and puts forward that the core of the communication is to find the best correlation, ultimately realizing the communicative intention. Furthermore, relevance translation theory also raises the concept of direct translation and indirect translation. In brief, relevance theory is of great guiding significance to translation studies and practice.In practice, the author finds that there are some similarities between communicative clues reproduction and style reproduction, both of which can interpret the characteristics of novel translation. But for the difference between Chinese and English, the event of how to realize style reproduction is a noteworthy issue. Therefore, the author does an exploration on how to properly reproduce communicative clues from the perspective of relevance theory, which is believed to ensure the representation of original style and successful communication. With some specific examples chosen from the translation work of Greene’s novel Travels with My Aunt being materials, the author conducts an analysis of how to grasp the communicative clues in six aspects, namely, voice, semantics, syntax, rhetoric, situational context and cultural elements, aiming to reproduce the original style and realize communicative intentions under the guidance of direct translation of relevance theory. Meanwhile, the author deepens the awareness and understanding of relevance theory through a conjoint analysis of theory and practice and proposes some methods such as sign maintaining, logical consistency keeping, reproducing, conversion and so forth, to make the communicative clues of Chinese version and that of original text realize the optimal relevance, ultimately achieving successful communication. The author hopes that it will be conducive to the practice of novel translation.