A Report On Translating The Meandering Jinjiang River:the History Of Bashu Culture(Excerpts From Chapter Two)

The translation material of this translation project is excerpted from Section Eight to Section Twelve in Chapter Two of The Meandering Jinjiang River: The History of Bashu Culture.The main content of this part includes heroic myths,colorful arts,philosophy,science as well as customs in Bashu area.By analyzing the source text,the translator finds there are many culture-loaded words,and it is also one of the difficult parts to be translated.Under the guidance of relevance theory,the translator mainly focuses on the discussion of translating culture-loaded words,and tries to find a better way to solve this problem.The relevance theory believes that translation is an instance of normal human communication,and it's also an ostensive-inferential communication.The translator needs to create a cognitive environment for the reader.The criteria of the inference is the relevance.The relevance is dependent on the contextual effect and processing effort.If the contextual effect is good,and the reader needs less efforts to infer,so the relevance is strong,while if the contextual effect is not good,the reader needs more efforts to infer,so the relevance is weak.So the goal is to let the reader get the optimal relevance.The translator should let the reader get the idea of the author and ensure the reader can use less effort to get more contextual effect.Culture-loaded words are the vocabulary which carry lots of cultural information and they also reflect the social life.The culture-loaded words are difficult to be understood because the target readers lack the background information of these words.Thus,the translator uses the methods of literal translation,free translation,literal translation plus annotation and combination of literal translation and free translation to solve the problem of translating culture-loaded words.Through the analysis,the translator finds that the relevance translation theory can better guide the translation of culture-loaded words,and it can also be used to guide the translation of historical and cultural texts.