A Practice Report On The Translation Of Academic Monograph Under The Guidance Of Relevance Theory

Based on the E-C translation of the academic monograph Myths of Babylonia and Assyria,this practice report aims to provide corresponding solutions for the translation difficulties encountered in the translation process under the guidance of Relevance Theory.During the translation process,major translation difficulties are summarized and divided into three aspects: proper nouns and cultural-loaded words at the lexical level;compound sentences and passive voice at the syntactical level,and cohesion and coherence at the discourse level.Relevance Theory interprets humans' verbal communication from the perspective of cognitive pragmatics and considers it an ostensive-inferential process.Based on this,Gutt proposes the relevant translation theories and believes that translation is a double ostensive-inferential process.The translator's responsibility is to seek the optimal relevance between the original author's intentions and the target readers' cognitive environment.Therefore,the author regards optimal relevance as the goal and puts forward corresponding translation methods and techniques for the above translation difficulties from the perspectives of strengthening contextual effect and reducing processing effort.To strengthen the contextual effect,the author infers the implicit meaning of the context and strengthens or confirms existing assumptions to solve the problem of cohesion;to improve coherence,the author eliminates contradictory or false assumptions;to reduce processing effort,the author first takes the English-Chinese language differences into consideration,and then seeks optimal relevance between the structures of source language and target language with details as follows: literal translation,transliteration plus footnote as well as literal translation plus footnote are used to translate proper names;literal translation plus footnote is adopted to translate cultural-loaded words;restructuring is utilized to translate compound sentences;and passive voice is retained or shifted to active voice.It is hoped that this practical report can provide references for the translation of academic monograph.