Love Puns In Li Shang-yin's Poems From The Perspective Of Relevance-Theoretic Approach

Li Shang–yin,a poet who lived in the late Tang Dynasty(A.D.836–A.D.907),is generally recognized as “Father of Misty Poem” in the history of classical Chinese poetry.Of the approximately 603 poems written by Li Shang–yin,more than 1/6 are love poems.The application of his obscure writing style in love poems is shown mainly by means of a rhetorical device — puns,utilizing the deep meaning hidden behind the surface meaning to express his love experiences.So in this thesis,two conditions need to be satisfied in order for “love puns” to happen: 1)a pun comes from love poems;2)the implied meaning of this pun is closely associated with poet's love experiences by serving as a communicative clue to interpret his poems.By studying the usage of “love puns” in Li Shang–yin's poems,we can look into how they reproduce his writing style of love poems.According to Gutt(2004: 191),the communicability requires that the target text “resemble the original closely enough in relevant respects”.In this situation,the translator has to consider what degree of resemblance he could aim for.As for how to determine what close enough resemblance is in relevant respects,the translator needs to look at both the likely benefits,i.e.,the contextual effects and the processing effort involved for the readers.Zhao(2012)comes up with a quantitative model of pragmatic translation of puns to measure the overlapping degree of “three meaning points” both in the target and original texts.According to the overlapping degree in each translation we can determine its equivalence degree.In this thesis,I divide the relevance degree into five levels,and they are respectively “irrelevant,weakly relevant,moderately relevant,strongly relevant and greatly relevant”.Then I make an attempt to combine the relevance degree with “three meaning points” in the quantitative model to measure the resemblance degree of “three meaning points” with the purpose of determining their equivalence degrees.The higher the relevance degree is,the higher the resemblance degree is in “three meaning points” and the readers can obtain adequate cognitive effect without paying unnecessary processing effort.In addition,by determining the resemblance degree in “three meaning points” of puns,I find out five kinds of translation techniques used by translators,including translating puns into zero,preserving the literal meaning,preserving the implied meaning,preserving double meanings and translating puns into identical puns(same type).According to statistics,most of the translators tend to use “preserving the literal meaning” in their translations.As an ideal translation technique “translating puns into identical puns(same type)”,by contrast,accounts for merely 3.2%.It shows that the majority of translators fail to take “love puns” as a communicative clue in Li Shang–yin's love poems to reproduce his love experiences,which weakens the rhetorical effects and poetic effects in the original to some degree.