The Study On English Translation Of Culture-Specific Items In Brusii Talks From Dream Brook From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Brush Talks from Dream Brook is a collection of works written by the prominent scholar-statesman Shen Kuo(1031-95)in the northern Song Dynasty.This encyclopedic book is composed of 609 jottings and is further classified into 17 parts covering a wide area such as official decrees and regulations,finance,military affairs,diplomacy,history,archeology,literature,art,science and technology.Brush Talks from Dream Brook is famous not only for its academic and historical value,but also for its scientific and technological value.Joseph Needham(1900-95),famous preeminent authority on the history of Chinese science,called it “a landmark in the history of science in China”.Its English version has delivered far-reaching influence since inception,attracting a great many scholars to conduct in-depth research.The translation methods applied to treat the culture-specific items in this book are of great research value.The notion of culture-specific items was first proposed by the Spanish scholar Javier Franco Aixelá.He defined culture-specific items as those textually actualized items whose function and connotations in a source text involve a translation problem in their transference to a target text.Relevance Theory was introduced into translation studies by Ernst August Gutt who regards translation as a kind of communication with the involvement of original authors,translators and readers.Translators perform both the roles of a hearer and a speaker in the dual ostensive-inferential communication with the responsibility of providing optimal relevance for the target readers.Taking Wang Hong’s English version Brush Talks from Dream Brook as a case study,this thesis analyzes its translation of culture-specific items from the perspective of relevance theory.This thesis concludes that relevance theory has some certain explanatory power on the English translation of culture-specific items in Brush Talks from Dream Brook.In addition,this thesis applies Aixelá’s eight translation methods to analyze Wang Hong’s translation of culture-specific items from the perspective of relevance theory,and people can follow these eight methods to translate the culture-specific items in Brush Talks from Dream Brook,so as to reach their purpose of translation optimization.This thesis also makes the following requests for the translator in translating the culture-specific items under the guidance of relevance theory: firstly,the translator should act his two roles well in the translation process;secondly,the translator should search for the optimal relevance in ST;thirdly,the translator should try his best to make the intentions of the original writer and the expectations of the target readers in line;fourthly,the translator should convey the optimal relevance to TT.