A Study Of The Translation Of Culture-loaded Words In Tales Of Hulan River By Howard Goldblatt From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Hulanhe Zhuan is a representative work of Xiao Hong,a female writer during the Republic of China period.It describes the social life of Hulan,a small town in northeastern China in the 1920 s.Goldblatt is a well-known Sinologist in the United States and is currently the highest valued translator of Chinese literature in the world of English.Goldblatt's translation of Tales of Hulan River is the only English version of Hulanhe Zhuan.Culture-loaded words are rooted in the culture of nations.The translation of culture-loaded words is not merely the transmission of literal information,but also the understanding and transmission of cultural connotations.The translation of cultureloaded words is a growing concern in the field of translation.Affected by the differences between Chinese and Western cultural contexts,the translation of culture-loaded words is hard for translators.This thesis takes the culture-loaded words in Tales of Hulan River as the research object and divides the culture-loaded words in the text into five categories of ecology,material,society,religion and language according to Nida's classification of culture.Relevance theory is about linguistic communication.The core issues of it are communication and cognition.Gutt applies relevance theory to translation.He proposes that translation involves two communicative activities between the original author,the translator and the target reader,which includes two ostensive-inferential processes.The translator takes charge of information transmission and should fully consider the target reader's cognitive context and receptivity during the translation process.Then the translator flexibly uses various translation methods to achieve the optimal relevance between the original text and the translation.The optimal relevance is what the translator strives for,and it is also the principle of translation research.This thesis selects the typical translation examples of Tales of Hulan River,adopts qualitative and quantitative research methods to study the translation methods and general laws adopted by Goldblatt from the perspective of relevance theory,to study how Goldblatt chooses between the original cultural characteristics and text readability,between the informative intention and communicative intention that the original author wants to convey,and whether Goldblatt's translation of culture-loaded words can ultimately achieve optimal relevance.According to statistics,there are a total of 906 culture-loaded words in Hulanhe Zhuan,the most of which are linguistic culture-loaded words(27.37%),followed bysocial culture-loaded words(27.04%)and material culture-loaded words(25.39%),and the last two are religious culture-loaded words(13.91%)and ecological culture-loaded words(6.29%).The study finds that relevance theory has strong explanatory power and theoretical guiding significance on the translation of culture-loaded words in Tales of Hulan River.When the Chinese and English cultural contexts are basically the same,Goldblatt uses direct translation more than other methods,that is,literal translation and transliteration.Literal translation can preserve the content and language form of culture-loaded words,and transliteration can preserve the rhythmic beauty.Direct translation can maximize the retention of cultural information,which is conducive to the transmission of the original author's informative intention and communicative intention.When the cultural information of the context is not enough for target readers to understand culture-loaded words through literal translation or transliteration,Goldblatt adopts literal translation plus annotation and transliteration plus annotation.These two methods can retain the cultural characteristics of culture-loaded words,at the same time,supplement relevant cultural backgrounds to reduce the processing effort of target readers to obtain maximum contextual effects.When there is a huge difference in the cultural context between Chinese and English cultural contexts,Goldblatt utilizes indirect translation more,that is,liberal translation,cultural substitution,amplification and omission.Indirect translation promotes the transmission of the original author's communicative intentions and enhances the readability of the translation at the cost of some cultural information loss,so that the target reader can understand the original meaning without paying too much processing effort.In general,the translation of culture-loaded words in Tales of Hulan River preserves the cultural characteristics of the original text as much as possible on the basis of conveying the original author's communicative intention and basically achieves optimal relevance.Nevertheless,we should also see that Goldblatt's translation is based on the assumption of the target language readers' context at that time.With the development of the times and the deepening of Sino-foreign cultural exchanges,some translations in Tales of Hulan River are no longer suitable for today's English readers,so this thesis also puts forward corresponding suggestions for these untimely translations.