The Translation Of Children's Literature From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Based on the Relevance Theory,this thesis selects the original of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion,the Witch and the Wardrobe and its three Chinese versions of Wu Pei's,Xiang Heping's and Chen Liangting & Liu Wenlan's as a corpus.This thesis uses some methods including comparative analysis method and questionnaire survey to compare and analyze the contextual effects and children's acceptance of the three versions from the aspects of linguistics,rhetoric and culture-loaded words,aiming to explore the guiding role of the Relevance Theory in E-C translation of children's literature and provide a new perspective for the study of children's literature translation.The findings of this thesis are as follows: 1)at the linguistic level,due to the ignorance of the cognitive characteristics of children readers and the differences between Chinese and English,obscure words and complex sentences often appear,which increases the processing efforts of reading.In this regard,colloquial and rhythmic words can be used to increase children's reading interest,and simple sentences are advised to be widely adopted;2)at the rhetorical level,because of the neglect of children readers' aesthetic characteristics and the differences between the two languages in the application of rhetoric,there appears the omission of rhetoric or simple literal translation,which results in the loss of the “naivety” in children's literature.In this respect,rhetoric can be flexibly translated or added appropriately,which not only conforms to the aesthetic characteristics of children readers,but also satisfies children's reading expectations and stimulates their reading interest;3)at the level of culture-loaded words,as a result of the ignorance of the cultural differences between the two languages and the receptivity of children readers,misinterpretation and literal translation tend to arise.As for the translation of names without any equivalent,transliteration with footnotes contributes to preserving the source culture.For slang and appellation,domestication can improve the readability and children's acceptance of the translation.For religious imagery words,foreignization can be employed to make the translation smooth and let readers experience local culture.