On Redundancy In Translation From The Perspective Of Information Theory

Shannon's(1916–2001)information theory has had a great influence on many fields of research,including the translation study.Its basic concepts such as channel capacity,noise,redundancy,communication load and so on have been applied in many fields,including communication theory,psychology and machine translation.The Kite Runner is one of the most eye-catching novel and bestseller written by Khaled Hosseini in recent years.Through this novel,the inner thought and life about children in Afghanistan is presented.In today's global political situation,this novel which reflects Afghanistan's culture owns a highly value of research.In China,as the representative of translated bestseller,research on its Chinese version is of great significance.However,researches on translated works from the perspective of information theory is relatively rare,especially on redundancy in translation.In this thesis,the author attempts to study the redundancy in translation from the perspective of information theory,with reference to Li Jihong's Chinese versions of the English novel The Kite Runner.Hopefully,this thesis tries to find out ways to lighten the TL formal linguistic and cultural communication load by controlling certain redundancy in Li Jihong's translation of The Kite Runner in order to let Chinese readers know more about culture of Afghanistan through Li Jihong's translation.Firstly,the thesis proposes problems of redundancy processing in Li Jihong's translation of The Kite Runner.That is,this thesis conducts research on redundancy in Li Jihong's translation of The Kite Runner through concrete examples,which constitutes the key part of the whole thesis.In this part,the redundancies are divided into two main types,that is,linguistic redundancy and cultural redundancy.Then,this thesis presents causes of redundancy in translation,for instance,different degree of redundancy between English and Chinese,particularity of Hosseni's cultural background,and target readers' channel capacity and the translation strategies,etc.Finally,this thesis proposes enlightenment of redundancy for literary translation practice and its own limitations.In fact,translation is a complex activity of information transmission.From the perspective of Information Theory,the process of translation is actually the sending and transmission of information,which provides a new perspective for translation study.It certainly draws the conclusion that the translation strategies adopted by the translator to overcome the noise caused by the differences of language and culture in order to match target readers' channel capacity constitute the key solution.In this thesis,Afghan words and idioms as well as English complicated formal linguistic redundancy and cultural redundancy constitute the noise of the whole communication system.To overcome all the noise,the redundancy in the translation shall be adjusted properly to make the original information transmit correctly.All of above is helpful to conduct the research on translation standard and essence and cope with the detailed problems in translation practice,which provides a reference to the related researchers on translation researches.