A Report On The Translation Of White Rose,Black Forest(Excerpts)

The historical novel,White Rose,Black Forest(2018),was written by the American contemporary writer,Eoin Dempsey.Based on the Second World War,the book tells a story of trust between the two strangers,a German nurse called Franka Gerber and an American spy named John Lynch.The translator took Chapter One to Five as the translating materials of this report.German linguist,Eurnst-August Gutt proposed relevance translation theory in 1991.The theory is the extension of relevance theory,raised by Gutt’s teachers,Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson,who consider communication as an ostensive-inferential process between the speaker and the hearer.Gutt claims that,translation,as an interlingual communication is an inferential-ostensive process.Translators should first infer the communicative intention of the author and then express it to readers of target language(TL).Therefore,a translator should be aware of the different cognitive environments of the author and that of the readers in TL.The optimal relevance of a text is achieved when the readers can have the adequate contextual effect with the least processing efforts in it.Under the guidance of relevance translation theory,the translator achieves the optimal relevance of the texts from three perspectives: lexical,semantic and syntactical level.In the lexical level,the translator usually adopts direct translation and annotations to improve the contextual effect and reduce the readers’ processing effort at the same time.In the semantic level,explanation is often used to reduce the readers’ processing effort.In the syntactical level,the translator pays attention to the conjunctions of the clauses and reconstructs the sentences.