A Study Of The Translations Of Eileen Chang’s Writings In The Light Of Relevance Theory

The present thesis focuses on the translated works of Aloeswood Incense:the First Brazier and Love in a Fallen City by Kingsbury from the perspective of relevance translation theory. The thesis aims to discuss how to realize intention recreation through the preservation of the communicative clues arising from the original language representation in the translated work.According to relevance translation theory, the communicative clues arising from the language representation can help readers to the interpretation intended by the communicator and contribute to the contextual effects. In this view, especially in fiction translation, the translator must consider to preserve the communicative clues so as to help the target readers derive the original intentions of the author, and obtain the same reading feelings as the original readers.Focusing on the communicative clues of the original, that is to say, adopting the same manifestation form as the original is very necessary to convey the author’s intentions. Semantic representations, syntactic properties, pragmatic properties, onomatopoeia, stylistic words can provide important clues for reasoning the original author’s intentions.This paper selects the English versions Aloeswood Incense:the First Brazier and Love in a Fallen City as basic texts to discuss the communicative clues in six aspects like semantic representation, pragmatic representation, syntactic features, onomatopoeic words, rhetorical devices and stylistic words.According to the study, most of Kingsbury’s English version employs direct translation approach, preserving communicative clues arising from semantic representations, syntactic representations, pragmatic properties, phonetic representations, stylistic words and so on. Then the target readers can infer the original author’s intentions with minimal processing effort through the same ostensive-inferential model as the original readers. However, direct method isn’t always suitable for the translation of words and phrases that are specific to Chinese cultures due to the differences of the original and target readers’cognitive environment, so indirect translation or the combination of both can ensure the target readers get maximal contextual effect by spending minimal processing effort. So it comes to a conclusion that in order to better convey the intentions to the target readers, the translator must choose translation strategies in a flexible way.Taking the communicative clues as the starting point, this paper analyzes some typical examples through the comparison of the original text and target text as well as simple statistics analysis, thus proving that a flexible use of translation strategy to preserve the communicative clues of the original work is very important to realize intention recreation. And this paper also points out its shortcomings and future research directions.