A Contrastive Study On The Translation Of Character Utterances In The Snows Of Kilimanjaro From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Ernest Miller Hemingway's short fiction, is acclaimed for its eternal theme of life and death. It is written by using stream of consciousness as its writing technique. The fiction has a good review of a dying person, with distinct theme, clear and concise language and rich connotation as well as strong readability. Fiction translation is an important part of literary translation. What's more, character utterance, as the essence of a fiction, has a very important function and meaning to reveal the theme and characters' image. So to speak, the translation quality of character utterance in the fiction will affect the quality of the whole fiction.Relevance Theory in pragmatics regards translation as two ostensive-inferential process. In this process, three parties, namely, the source language writer, translator and target language readers, are all indispensable. The responsibility of the translator is particularly important. Translators infer the source language author's communicative intention and the target language readers' cognitive environment, and convey manifestness to target language readers, in order to obtain optimal relevance. To achieve optimal relevance, the translator should also appropriately modify target language context. The translator should assure that the translation can provide adequate contextual effect for the target language readers with unnecessary or minimal effort. The theory has strong explanatory power, which divides translation strategy into direct translation and indirect translation. It can guide the translator to better dig out speakers' implicit meanings of character utterances and provide effective method for its translation. Therefore, from the perspective of pragmatic translation and guided by the Relevance Theory, this thesis chooses different translations of character utterance in The Snows of Kilimanjaro to make a comparative study, and to explore different methods of both translations in the translation process, and further analyze how to achieve optimal relevance between translations and the original.Through this study, it is concluded that first in the process of translation of character utterances,though two translators adopt different main translation strategies, they use two translation strategies flexibly according to the different implicit meanings. Second, both direct translation and indirect translation are advisable translation strategies. In most cases, these two translation strategies are used together. It should be noticed that the indirect translation is more effective than direct translation in translation of implicit meanings of character utterances. Whichever translation strategy is adopted, the common goal of the translator is to achieve optimal relevance with the source text but with unnecessary or smallest efforts.Third, both direct translation and indirect translation of Relevance Translation Theory have important guiding significance for implicatures of characters and can effectively guide the translation of such character utterance.