A Comparative Study Of Two Chinese Versions Of The Bonesetter’s Daughter:Perspective From Relevance Theory

The Bonesetter’s Daughter is a work,written by Amy Tan,a Chinese-American novelist,on the theme of mother-daughter relationship.It consists of three parts,telling the conflict between the two generations of mother and daughter.It is a novel of importance for researcher to explore intercultural conflicts between Chinese and American.The Relevance Theory,presented by Dan Sperber and Deidre Wilson,tries to explain such philosophical problem as how the cognitive mechanism of human brain works when language communication between human beings happens.Later,it was introduced by Gutt into translation studies.He believed that translation was also an act of communication and translators should spare no efforts to ensure the success of the communicative process.This thesis,by adopting Relevance Theory,makes a comparative analysis of two Chinese versions of The Bonesetter s Daughter from the perspective of lexicon,sentence and culture.The analysis attempts to find out whether the translator takes the cognitive environment of the readers into consideration,has a good command of the similarities and differences of language and culture,and can accurately convey the intention of the original text.It is concluded that an accurate translation version must be the one which not only weighs and considers the context expressed in each word and each sentence,but also keeps the original author’s intention to the intended reader;otherwise,the communicative action involved in the translation process can not be satisfactorily completed,the informative intention of the original author can not be accurately transmitted,and the good translation seems unlikely to be produced.