A Report On The Translation Of Social Science Texts From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

With the development of cross-cultural communication activities between China and western countries,a number of the translation of social science works appeared,showing Chinese readers a panorama of western cultural trends and social norms.As the general social sciences works contain few incomprehensible terms or concepts such as natural science works do,and the literariness of language is quite plain,the translation of social sciences has not been fully discussed by translators and scholars.Based on the Relevance Theory proposed by Dan Wilson and Deirdre Sperber,Ernst Gutt put forward a "relevance-theoretic approach" to solve problems encountered in the process of translation.He sees translation as a special communication activity between two languages.The task of the translator is to seek the optimal relevance,between source language and target language,that is,to allow the reader to obtain enough contextual effects with minimum processing efforts.This thesis discusses the translation of social science texts based on the main principles of Relevance Theory and how it is applied to translation practice.By analyzing translated examples in the excerpts of a book named All the Single Ladies,the author explores how to achieve optimal relevance in a social science work and obtain contextual effects.Specific strategies and techniques for the translation of social sciences are also expected to be introduced to offer a new vision to translators.The thesis is divided into five chapters.The first chapter is a brief introduction;the second chapter is an extensive literature review;the third chapter illustrates the main contents of Relevance Theory;In the next part of the thesis,Relevance Theory is applied to the translation of a social science book called All the Single Ladies on the level of semantics,syntax as well as cultures and communications;and the last part of the thesis presents the conclusion of the whole research.