Translating Magic Terms In Children Literature Into Chinese From Relevance Theory Perspective

The Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is one of the best sellers around the world.It is the last volume of the Harry Potter series written by British writer J·K·Rowling.In the field of comparative literature,many of previous researches focused on themes as well as the spreading of the series,while others attentively explored the cultural prototype of proper nouns in the series.Researches in the field of translation studies were conducted primarily from reception theory and skopos theory perspectives.This thesis adopts relevance theory as the theoretical framework and selects the Chinese version of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows as the subject of research.The purpose of the present research is to identify and clarify the translation strategies and methods that translators tend to use to establish the correlation between the source and the target text when translating children's fantasy literature.Taking the case study as the primary research method,the author analyses examples from the perspective of relevance theory.The research indicates that,during the translation process,translators used both domestication and foreignisation to render the magic terms,with domestication as the primary and foreignisation as complementary translation strategy to reduce the reading difficulties encountered by young Chinese readers and achieve the optimal relevance.Specific conclusions are as following: 1.If a magic term is of Latin origin,the translator tends to use domestication translation strategy and liberal translation method.2.If a magic term is the one invented by Rowling,the translator tends to use a variety of translation methods based on the combination of domestication and foreignisation to increase the contextual effect and reduce reader processing efforts in the hope of achieving the optimal relevance.