Translating Chang'an Publicity Materials For Foregin Investment Attraction:A Relevance Theory Perspectve

The paper is a practice report based on the author's translation of Chang'an publicity materials for foreign investment attraction,issued by the government of Chang'an District,Xi'an city of Shaanxi province.The publicity materials serve both as a reference and promotion for potential investors to invest in Chang'an District by introducing the investment climate and project in detail.The text consists of three parts covering Preface,Investment Climate and Project Description,giving priority to the vocative function.Based on the Chinese writing convention,each of the three parts serve a distinct communicative intention via a different language style.Preface provides with a rich historical and cultural background,aiming at triggering emotional attention with plenty of cultural-loaded items and parallel structures.Investment Climate offers detailed local information to arouse rational attention.Project Description introduces geographical location,policies,and project advantages aiming at investment directly.Literal translation of the above linguistic features will lead to cognitive problems.Meanwhile,the introduction to project advantages which highlights vocative function with commendatory words which may cause empathy when literally translated.From the perspective of optimal relevance,the author proposes variation translation as the main solution to the difficulties.Condensed and selective translations are adopted to deal with the historical and cultural terms,honorary titles so as to lower the processing effort of the TL readers;parallel structures,four-character structures are simplified with core concept extraction and explicitation of logical relations.The paper aims at improving the translation effect of the project,and hopefully will shed light on translations of the same nature in the future.