A Report On The Translation Of The Round House In The Framework Of The Relevance Translation Theory

The novel The Round House,written by Louise Erdrich,an Indian woman writer,narrates a story about a mysterious violent sexual abuse as well as the sad growth and experience of an Indian teenager in the mainstream culture of white people.The source text,which describes both the history of the Indian culture and the contemporary life of the Indian people,is full of humanistic care.Besides,the growth of the Indian teenager also has certain enlightenment for teenagers,and its practical significance greatly appeals to the interest of the translator.Ernst-August Gutt's Relevance Translation Theory(1991)is based on the Relevance Theory proposed by Sperber and Wilson(1986).In his theory,translation is regarded as an instance of interlingual interpretive use of language.Gutt believes the two translation methods—direct translation and indirect translation constrained by interpretive resemblance and the principle of relevance from the Relevance Theory — give an unified account of translation.Indirect translation purports to make the translation share all the explicatures and implicatures with the source text while direct translation provides all the communicative clues.Gutt distinguishes direct translation from indirect translation,the former meaning that the translation should convey the same meaning as the source text,whereas the latter involving looser degrees of faithfulness(Gutt,2000,pp.76-92).This translation report will respectively discuss the translation on such different linguistic levels as words,sentences,text,as well as figures of speech centering on direct translation and indirect translation.Thereinto,direct translation mainly includes transliteration,literal translation and annotation;while indirect translation involves a much wider processing range,for example,interpreting and substitution in translating culture-loaded words,division,addition and omission in translating complicated sentences.Lastly,when coming to rhetoric,simile,metaphor,personification and hyperbole are most commonly used in the source text.The translator chiefly chooses conversion and extension in translating them.Whether direct translation or indirect translation is adopted,the translator aims to create a translation of optimal relevance from which the target language readers are able to get the greatest contextual effects with minimal efforts by making a correct estimate of the differences between the source text language and the target language,and considering the source text author's intention and the target readers' cognitive environment.The source text has eleven chapters and only the first two are translated.This translation report includes four parts: the task description,including introduction to the author,the source text and significance of the translation project;an account of the Relevance Translation Theory;the case study and the conclusion.