| Good sleep is very important to the health of each person.At present,many people are suffering from sleep problems due to various reasons,such as stress,which affect their health,work and life.Helping people better understand the nature of sleep could help solve this problem to some extent.Understanding Sleep and Dreaming is a popular sci-tech book on sleep science and clinical sleep medicine.The book systematically outlines all the major aspects of sleep as well as dreaming and summarizes the author—Moorcroft’s 25 years of clinical,research and teaching experience,thus helpful to people who want to form healthy sleep habits.The book consists of 13 chapters,of which chapter 12 mainly focuses on the difficulties people may encounter in sleeping and dreaming,which is closely related to improving people’s sleep quality.Therefore,with Relevance Theory as the theoretical framework,the analysis of the process of translating chapter 12 into Chinese was conducted in the thesis.Relevance theory,a theory on pragmatics,has been introduced into the field of translation studies and has great explanatory power for translation.In the framework of Relevance Theory,human communication is regarded as an ostensive-inferential process.When translating,a translator should not only understand the superficial meaning of a sentence,but also need infer the communicative intention of the source text writer based on the specific context.Meanwhile,the translator needs to take the cognitive environment of target language readers into consideration,and makes the translation enjoy the greatest contextual effects to achieve optimal relevance.It was found that Relevance Theory could be of great help to the translation of sleep-themed texts.On the lexical level,methods of literal and free translation can be adopted.The translator should select words carefully to make the translated words achieve optimal relevance.On the syntactic level,alternative methods such as addition,omission,division and conversion of voice can be flexibly used for the same effect.The author sincerely hopes this thesis will be of help to translating texts on sleep medicine and other related ones. |
