A Relevance-theoretic Approach To The Style Translation Of Atonement

Ian McEwan is one of the most significant writers in the contemporary British literary world.His novel Atonement has enjoyed worldwide critical acclaim,which fully embodies McEwan's creative writing skills and complicated writing style and thus also poses a great challenge to the translator.Style translation is the creative reproduction of the source text style.Within the framework of relevance theory,Gutt(2004)puts forward the notion of direct translation,which has provided a new possible way for the translation of style through the preservation of communicative clues.Meanwhile,it is found that the language of Atonement can serve as a rich collection of communicative clues to the author's style.Therefore,in light of relevance theory,the present study is designed to probe into the style translation of Atonement through a comparative analysis of Guo Guoliang's and Fan Wenmei's handling of the novel's communicative clues.Then an effective way of doing style translation is summarized through the analysis.The study finds out that,firstly,on the whole,Guo pays more attention to the naturalness of expression while Fan is prone to preserve the original linguistic properties.In addition,both translators' improper translation and ignorance of the novel's communicative clues inevitably lead to different degrees of style loss in their translations.Secondly,though the translation of communicative clues may suffer some small losses in stylistic properties and contextual effects,it is seldom the case that the main thrust of the original is not communicable at all.Thus through the comparative study of Atonement,this thesis proves the feasibility of fiction style translation through the preservation of communicative clues.However,due to the radical linguistic and cultural gaps,there is a limitation of translatability in style translation.Thirdly,in the framework of relevance theory,style translation is actually treated as a dual ostensive-inferential process,governed by the principle of optimal relevance.The translator first needs to find optimal relevance,i.e.,the author-intended interpretation from the communicative clues and the originally-envisaged contextual assumptions.Then the translator conveys his/her understandings to the target readers,enabling them to derive optimal relevance from the translated text.In transferring optimal relevance,this thesis also emphasizes the need for the translator to take measures to bridge the contextual gaps between the source context and the target context,helping the readers get the closest possible communicative clues to the original.