A Contrastive Study On The Translation Of Culture-loaded Words In The Two English Versions Of The Art Of War From The Perspectives Of Relevance Theory And Cultural Schema Theory

As an important part of the fine traditional culture of China, The Art of War possesses a number of culture-loaded words with rich cultural connotations, especially the profound military thoughts and philosophy. However, the translation of these culture-loaded words is always a difficult task due to the cultural differences between the East and the West.Translation can be regarded as a dual ostensive-inferential process from the perspective of Relevance Theory(RT). The key to a successful translation depends on whether the translator can understand correctly the context and communicative intention of the author of the source language(SL) as well as the context of the audiences of the target language(TL). Cultural Schema Theory(CST) believes that the knowledge frame and cultural information stored in human’s brain can be of great importance in decoding and encoding new knowledge. The translator will perform more efficiently and precisely in the process of decoding the message from SL and encoding the information to the TL if relevant cultural schema is activated.This thesis intends to make an analysis of two representative English versions of The Art of War translated by Giles and Lin Wusun respectively to show the similarities and differences of the two translators in their translation of culture-loaded words and explore how to deal with the cultural information of the culture-loaded words from the perspectives of RT and CST.Through the contrastive analysis, two major findings of this thesis are as follows :1. When the cultural schema is equivalent in both cultures, Giles and Lin adopt similar translating methods to activate corresponding schema in the target readers’ brains to get to optimal relevance. When the cultural schema is similar to that in the target culture or when it does not exist in the target culture, Giles tends to adopt domestication to convey the basic communicative intention of the author. Lin, however, intends to adopt foreignization, trying to retain the cultural information of the culture-loaded words in his translation.2. RT and CST can shed some light translating the culture-loaded words: whether to retain the cultural connotations of the culture-loaded words in The Art of War in the translation relies heavily on whether such cultural information provides the audiences adequate and essential contexts. The adoption of translation methods such as transliteration plus note and annotation can preserve the cultural connotations of culture-loaded words and help the TL readers form or adjust relevant cultural schema which provides them adequate cognitive environments in their ostensive-inferential process.