A Study On Translation Of Speech Presentation Modes In Fortress Besieged From The Perspective Of Relevance-theoretic Translation Theory

Weicheng,one of the masterpieces in modern Chinese literature,is known for its art of the language which embodies the writer's lingual wisdom.The lively characters and plots in Weicheng have attracted great attention since it was published.Language contributes a lot to the success of this novel.It employs a large number of speech presentation modes to manifest each character's images,personalities and psychological activity.Its English version Fortress Besieged,jointly translated by Jeanne Kelly and Nathan Mao,was published in America.It wins great fame for this novel around the world.In Weicheng,the narrator adopts a omniscient point of view to tell a story about love and marriage.It means that the narrator takes full control of the character,the plot and the scene.In order to create a certain narrative context,the narrator has to shift the perspective,adjust interference and narration flow.In this case,the readers sometimes need to identify who is talking and who is reporting.The narrator reports the character's utterance directly and indirectly.Therefore,how the character's utterances are reported is a typical feature in Weicheng.Many linguists and pragmatists are interested in reported speech.Linguists analyze the reported speech on the level of grammar,syntax and semantics.Pragmatists prefer to analyze their pragmatic meanings.However,they mainly focus on the daily conversation and news report,which is really different from the novel.Because these utterances normally happen in the real world while the utterances in the novel happen in a mock world.Narratologists are interested in the narrative perspective and narrative effects produced by the language in the novel.Therefore,it seems that few scholars have been involved in reported speech in the novel and its translation.For the translators,they will face a great challenge of identifying how the narrator's and the character's utterance are expressed.Based on this,the thesis attempts to take speech presentation modes in Fortress Besieged as the studying object,and tentatively structures a relevance-theoretic approach to the translating process of speech presentation modes with the guidance of Relevance-theoretic Translation Theory,so as to analyze how the translators interpret the source utterance,how they achieve the optimal relevance to target readers as well as in the whole translating process what methods the translators adopt in Fortress Besieged.This study has shown how the narrator reports the character's utterances in the novel is really different from those in the real world.Because of the language differences like no tense-indicators,no subject and weak clause consciousness in Chinese,the translators sometimes can not identify the reference.When they fail to achieve the optimal relevance to the narrator,they will have less confidence in translating process.In order to create adequate contextual effects,the translators take the target readers' cognitive environment into consideration,based on which they employ direct translation or indirect translation methods to make timely adjustments both in the mode and the content.In addition,the mode and the content are not independent.When the translators process the character's utterance,they are not only processing the mode but also the content.With the interaction of the mode and the content,the translators' cognitive schema is motivated.In this way,they can find the narrator's communicative intention.