A Report On The C-E Translation Of The Relationship Garden Of Self Cultivation From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

The translation project is selected from the essay The Relationship Garden of Self-cultivation of the contemporary famous female writer Bi Shumin,who intends to serve as a guide for her readers to learn to become self-cultivated in life.The language is vivid and beautiful with enlightening thoughts,however,because of original author's profound writing ability and knowledge,numerous culturally-loaded expressions,proper nouns and four-character structures are employed in this essay from lexical level;From syntactical level,Chinese special sentences and complex sentences with the hypotaxis feature of Chinese can not be ignored.From paragraph level,various kinds of rhetorical devices,such as metaphor,parallelism and rhetorical question,are employed to strengthen expressive effects of articles,which pose great challenge during translation.In this report,the translator makes an attempt to explore the translation of literary texts from the perspective of relevance theory.Relevance theory deems verbal communication as an ostensive-inferential process and emphasizes that two crucial elements matter the achievement of optimal relevance,they are "processing effort" and "contextual effect",whose relationship could be showed in this formula:Relevance=Contextual Effect/Processing Effort.Namely,other things being equal,the greater the contextual effect,the smaller the processing effort,the greater the relevance.Based on relevance theory,Gutt takes initiative to apply relevance theory into translation and puts forward two translation notions:"direct translation" and "indirect translation" on the basis of cognitive environment.However,the translator finds that it does not apply to all the circumstance in translation practice,concrete translation strategies and skills are needed according to different situations.In case analysis guided by relevance theory,the translator first makes analysis on the differences of cognitive environments between original and target readers,and then tries to explore how to reproduce or create enough contextual effects and reduce processing efforts at the same time in target text on the basis of conveying original author's intention,in order to achieve optimal relevance between source text and target text.