A Comparative Study Of Translations Of Names Of Objects In Shijing From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

As the earliest collection of poems in Chinese literary history,Shijing consists of 305 poems produced during a period of about 500 years from early Western Zhou Dynasty to the middle of the Spring and Autumn period,reflecting the then social life of the Chinese people.Multi-themed and colossal in content,the book is of high artistic value.Translating of Shijing into the foreign language began in the 17th century.Since the 19th century,different English versions of Shijing have emerged.The She King by the British Sinologist James Legge and Book of Poetry by Chinese translator Xu Yuanchong are the most successful and frequently studied English translations,demonstrating different effective ways of translating names of objects in Shijing.Relevance Theory is the most influential cognitive pragmatics theory in recent years,focusing on human cognition and communication.Linguists Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson proposed Relevance Theory in 1986 with emphasis on ostensive-inferential communication,contextual assumptions and inference,and the optimal relevance principle.Based on Relevance Theory,German linguist Ernst-August Gutt put forward Relevance-Theoretical Translation Theory,which provides a unified account of translation,regarding translation as a form of secondary communication involving the author of the source language,the translator and the reader of the target language,an ostensive-inferential communication process and an interpretive use of language.Gutt proposed "genuine" and good translation methods,direct translation and indirect translation,and the conditions for successful communication in translation.This paper,based on the relevance-theoretic translation theory,compares and analyzes the English translations of names of objects in Shijing respectively by Legge and Xu Yuanchong,finding that both translations demonstrate the interpretative use of language;Xu Yuanchong mainly adopted indirect translation,maintaining most relevant communicative clues of the source text while Legge used more direct translation for the purpose of keeping as many communicative clues in the source text as possible;in satisfying linguistic conditions for successful translation,Xu didn't pursue the exact equivalence of words and sentences whereas Legge emphasized structural resemblance;contextually Xu made the contextual implicature as explicit as possible,and Legge tried to make the target readers approach the original contextual assumption to understand the original text through reference.This research attempts to explore a new perspective of translating classical Chinese poetry and enhances the recognition of the artistic values and worldwide transimission of Chinese classics represented by Shijing.