A Report On E-C Translation Of The Mouse With The Question Mark Tail Based On Relevance Translation Theory

The Mouse with the Question Mark Tail is a work of children's literature written by Richard Peck,a famous American writer of children's literature.It tells a story that an orphan mouse explores his roots.To some extent,this book can promote the formation of children's persistent and good characters and help them establish correct animal ethics.And it also can help Chinese children readers learn some Britain cultural phenomena and enrich their knowledge.The writer hopes to present this excellent children's literature work to Chinese children.Gutt(1991)proposed relevance translation theory based on Sperber and Wilson's(1986)relevance theory.And he proposed direct and indirect translations to deal with the style and content of the original work.The writer mainly adopted indirect translation,supplemented by direct translation in the translation based on judgement of children readers' cognitive context and their cognitive ability,reducing children readers' gratuitous processing effort and making them get relatively enough contextual effect and helping them build optimal relevance with the original information and the original author' intentions.In addition,some specific translation methods and techniques are applied when translating.The original author's intentions are presented through the style and content of the original work.Firstly,the stylistic features of the original work are presented through these communicative clues,including onomatopoeia and stylistic values of words,short sentences,rhetorical properties and cultural properties.In order to keep the style of the original as much as possible and manifest the original author's intentions to children readers,the writer adopted direct translation to keep these communicative clues to help them build optimal relevance with the original information and the original author's intentions.At lexical level,the writer adopted literal translation to keep onomatopoeia and stylistic values of words;at syntactical level,short sentences were kept through omission,combination,and division;at rhetorical level,the writer used literal translation and addition to keep some original rhetorical properties;at cultural level,the writer utilized literal translation,endnote,and word-to-word translation to keep these cultural properties that can enrich children's knowledge and are familiar with them.Secondly,in order to reduce children readers' processing effort when they build optimal relevance with the original information and the original author's intentions and make them get enough contextual effect,the writer adopted indirect translation in dealing with difficulties in the original work that would cost children readers too much gratuitous processing effort to get enough context or would mislead them in interpreting the original information or make them get no relevance with the original text by translating the original work directly.At lexical level,for those words whose contextual meanings are different from their literal meanings,the writer used explanation;at syntactical level,for some elliptical sentences that omit too much information or some that would mislead children when interpreting the original author' intentions,addition was used by the writer;at rhetorical level,for some exaggerations that manifest information conflicting with children's cognitive context and confusing them,the writer adopted paraphrase;at cultural level,for those cultural phenomena that Chinese children readers are not familiar with or are not easy to be interpreted through context by them,the writer utilized conversation,explanation,and addition.The writer has got the following experience through this translation practice.The readers of children's literature are children,who have relatively limited cognitive ability and weak logic ability.Translators should take the readers' cognitive context into full consideration when translating so as to reduce their efforts in reading,and help them obtain sufficient contextual effect and establish optimal relevance with the original information and the author's intentions.The writer hopes that this translation report could provide some help for the translation of children's literature works.