Translation Of Culture-specific Items In Happy Dreams From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Against the backdrop of Chinese culture “going global”,great importance has been attached to the translation of Chinese literary works.Local literature occupies an important part in contemporary Chinese literary works.The culture-specific items in Chinese local literary works play an important role in showing a general picture of Chinese rural culture.However,the translation of them poses a great challenge for translators because of the uniqueness and complexity of meaning of culture-specific items.According to relevance theory,translation is a dual ostensive-inferential process.The ultimate goal of translation is to achieve optimal relevance between the source text and the cognitive environment of the target audience who expects to derive adequate contextual effects without unnecessary processing effort.The principle of optimal relevance has provided a new perspective for the translation of culture-specific items in Chinese local literature.Happy Dreams written by Jia Pingwa is a representative work of Chinese local literature.This thesis intends to conduct a qualitative study of the English translation of culture-specific items in Happy Dreams from the perspective of relevance theory,hoping to provide a new perspective for the translation of local literature and still to provide some valuable references for Chinese culture going global.This thesis will discuss the following three questions:(1)What translation methods have been adopted by Harman and what are the factors influencing her choice under the guidance of relevance theory?(2)Is there any optimal relevance in her choice of translation methods?(3)Against the backdrop of Chinese culture going global,what are the implications of optimal relevance in translating culture-specific items,especially in Chinese local literature?Through the comparative study of some typical examples of culture-specific items and their English translation in Happy Dreams,this thesis draws the following conclusions: Both the direct translation and the indirect translation are adopted in the translation of culture-specific items in Happy Dreams.When the cognitive environments of the source author and target readers are the some or similar to each other,direct translation has been adopted;When the target readers' contextual environment differs markedly from that of the original author,indirect translation has been adopted.There are many examples of optimal relevance in the translation.However,there are also examples of maximal relevance.This is due to the author's concern of the huge differencebetween the cognitive environment of the source text reader and target text reader.At last,the thesis ventures a guiding principle governing the translation of culture-specific items: the translator should choose the translation methods which are in line with the pursuit of optimal relevance in the particular context so as to make the original author's intention meet with the target audience's expectation.Both the direct translation and the indirect translation are the methods to achieve optimal relevance.Against the backdrop of Chinese culture going global,with the guarantee of successful communication,direct translation is recommended as it can give target readers more opportunity to enjoy the exoticism and freshness of culture other.