A Report On The Translation Of Bad Luck Shadow (Excerpts)

This report is based on the translation of the novel Bad Luck Shadow and is dedicated to the analysis of the rendering of the implicit information underlying the utterances in the book.First,due to the fact that many metaphorical uses tend to contain a wide range of implicit information with varying degrees of strength and the likeness of the two propositions in metaphors and similes is left implicit,I argue that the translator should bear the responsibility to differentiate the strong implicature from the weak implicatures and explicate the implicit information in metaphorical uses so that the translator is able to understand the original text by obtaining the optimally relevant interpretation intended by the original writer for the source reader to retrieve.Second,I focus on the rendering of the implicit information caused by different cognitive contexts and expound on how to translate the implicit information in light of relevance theory.I hold that the strategy of explication should be adopted in such a way that the optimally relevant interpretation the target reader obtains from the target text is equivalent to the optimally relevant interpretation achieved by the original reader from the original text.Explication can be divided into two types,either by supplying the contextual assumptions,that is by the strategy of addition,or by spelling out the contextual implication,that is by the strategy of domestication.