Translation Strategies Of Material Culture-Loaded Words In Red Sorghum From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

This paper chooses Mo Yan's representative novel Red Sorghum,as well as the English version of Ge Haowen,known as “the most authoritative translator of Chinese literature in the western world”,as the research object.The purpose of this paper is to apply the relevance theory of pragmatics to study the translation strategies of some material culture-loaded words in the book.Relevance theory,as a communicative theory in cognitive pragmatics,is now being used by more and more people in translation studies.The core concept of this theory is relevance,which is influenced by two factors:contextual effect and inferential efforts.Under the same conditions,the stronger the contextual effect,the greater the relevance;the less the inferential effort,the greater the relevance.Relevance theory believes that the process of verbal communication is the process of seeking the best relevance;that is,the listener or the reader can obtain sufficient contextual effects after exerting effective efforts in discourse comprehension.The translation of Chinese culture-loaded words is a typical problem that western translators encounter in translating Chinese literary works.On the basis of Nida's cultural classification,this paper further classifies the material culture-loaded words according to the linguistic characteristics of the novel,and explores the strategies adopted in the translation of the material culture-loaded words in the English version.Researches are also about whether the translation has enough relevance in the English context,and whether they make the meaning of the translation similar to that of the original text.This paper points out that achieving the equivalence or closeness of the relevance of information in the two languages should be the guiding principle and goal pursued by the translator in the translation process,and it is also the power potentially drives the translator to adopt an appropriate translation strategy;the translator should be sensitive enoughto sense the change of information relevance,and can accurately assess the degree of relevance,and then take appropriate translation strategies.Under the guidance of this theory,through the study of the English version of Red Sorghum,this paper finds that both domestication and foreignization strategies are used in translating material culture-loaded words,but the translator is more inclined to use domestication.The translator will combine two translation strategies sometimes to enable the target readers to understand the linguistic and cultural characteristics of the original text and the style of the text.In this way,it can not only preserve Chinese language and cultural characteristics,but also improve the relevance of the context in the translated language,which helps the target readers to understand and learn Chinese culture more deeply.Contextual effects and relevance will also change as translation strategies change.This paper argues that under the current situation of strong western cultural invasion,translators are obliged to adopt appropriate translation strategies in the process of translating Chinese literary works into English,to maintain good relevance with the original Chinese text in the English context as much as possible,and to enhance the contextual effect.The goodness is that the target readers can learn Chinese language and culture with less inferential efforts,thus promoting Chinese culture to “go global”and carry forward Chinese culture.