A Study On Translation Of English Malapropism From Communicative Perspective Of Relevance

Malapropism springs from French “malapropos”.A malapropism is the use of an incorrect word in place of a word with a similar sound,resulting in a nonsensical,often humorous utterance.Chinese scholars pay close attention to its origin,translation and meaning.Additionally,they compare malapropism with a traditional Chinese rhetorical device—“fei bai” in both English and Chinese literature.However,the translation is too difficult to attract translators' attention.Translators tend to ignore them or translate them into target words.There are a lot of malapropisms in the novel Tess of the d'Urbervilles written by Thomas Hardy.These malapropisms describe character vividly and construct language characteristics.There is much difference between the author,the translator and the target language readers in many aspects.How to understand and translate these malapropisms has become a major difficulty.Relevance Theory is a pragmatic theory proposed by Sperber and Wilson in 1986.The theory was originally used to explain cognition and communication.Their student,Ernst August Gutt studied translation in accordance with the RT and put forward relevance translation theory.Different from traditional translation theory,relevance translation theory views translation as a communicative process.Its communicative perspective of RT emphasized the essence of translation of ostensive inference.It regards translation as a process to achieve optimal relevance between the SL and TL readers' cognitive context.With the application of communicative perspective of RT,this thesis will analyze the malapropisms of Tess of the d'Urbervilles from cognitive context,ostensive-inferential and optimal relevance.This thesis attempts to create a new vision and arouse the translators' attention on the malapropisms translation.This thesis is organized in the following way: The introduction part presents the background,purpose and significance of the research.Chapter one is the literature review part,which introduces the definition of malapropism,overseas and domestic research status and the text selection.Chapter two demonstrates the theoretical foundation of cognitive context,ostensive inference and optimal relevance.These three parts are applied to analyze the malapropisms translation.Thus it proves that communicative perspective has a wide directing effect to translation.Chapter three analyzes the malapropisms translation in Tess of the d'Urbervilles and classifies them into three types.According to the conclusion of chapter three,chapter four tries to translate some malapropisms of these three types.This thesis will find enlightenment from communicative perspective of RT.