A Comparative Study Of Contextual Effects Of The Translations Of The Last Battle From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

As a classic children's fantasy literature,The Chronicles of Narnia: The Last Battle was written by C.S.Lewis in the 1950 s.The Last Battle conveys religious ideas,mainly traditional Christian themes and also from Greek and Roman mythology.Scholars mainly center on its religious theme.However,few scholars has ever studied the quality of its Chinese versions.This study selects two Chinese versions of The Last Battle(i.e.Xiang Heping's version and Wu Pei's version)and takes Relevance Theory as a framework to compare and analyze the contextual effects and children's acceptance of the two versions,aiming to provide a new way for translation studies of children's fantasy literature.In 1986,Sperber and Wilson proposed Relevance Theory.On the basis of Relevance Theory,Gutt(1991)put forward Relevance Translation Theory which argues translation as a dual communicative process,namely the first ostensive-inferential process between the original author and the translator,and the second one between the translator and the target readers.The purpose of translation is to make the target readers obtain contextual effects similar to those of the original readers.Therefore,the translator needs to have a sound comprehension of the contextual messages of the original text and the cognitive characteristics of the target readers.Through a questionnaire survey,online comments and corpus linguistic methods,this study explores the relevance of meaning between the two Chinese versions and the original version from the perspective of accurateness,conciseness and vividness.Besides,this study also analyzes the stylistic relevance between the original work and the translated ones in terms of features of rhetoric device,voice and syntax.Lastly,a comparative analysis of the cultural relevance concerned with cultural-loaded words and religious imageries is made to investigate whether the translator succeeds in conveying the original intention to the readers.The main research findings are as follows: With regard to the meaning level,compared with Xiang's version,Wu's version conveys the original meaning accurately;the low lexical density and short average sentence length employed by Wu make it easier for children to understand.The appropriate adding and omitting strategies in Wu's text make the expression of the target language more vivid and fluent.In terms of style,the extensive use of reduplicated words and onomatopoeia in both versions increases the readability of the text.In order to adapt to children's cognitive and aesthetic characteristics,Wu makes certain adjustments to the aspects of rhetoric device,voice and syntax,which strengthens the degree of stylistic relevance between the target and the original work.As far as culture is concerned,Xiang adopts foreignization strategy to preserve the western religious culture conducive to cultural exchanges,which causes more processing effort for children.Wu adopts the method of domestication and receives a higher degree of readers' acceptance.Under the guidance of Relevance Theory,in order to achieve a thorough contextual effect in children's fantasy literature translation,translators need to give priority to the background information and the communicative intention of the original work.Then s/he should consider the reading ability and cognitive characteristics of children and employ concise,understandable and vivid expressions to stimulate children's interest.In addition,translated versions with rhythmic words and rhetoric device,voice and syntax that conform to children's cognitive characteristics are easier to be accepted by children.The translation strategy of domestication facilitates the acquirement of similar cultural cognitive effects as the source language readers.