On The Translation Of Poetic Lines In Liaozhai Zhiyi From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

This thesis aims to investigate the poetic lines in Liaozhai Zhiyi and their translations from the perspective of relevance theory.Liaozhai Zhiyi is a famous and classical collection of Chinese short stories of the supernatural and is well-known in the western world.There are many translated versions of it and Herbert Allen Giles’ version entitled Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio is one of the important because many translated versions are created based on it.Even though recent years have witnessed many research results of Giles’ version,it still deserves further investigation.Contributing a lot to the literariness of Liaozhai Zhiyi,poetic lines and their translations are worthy of investigation.As a universal genre all over the world,poetry has its unique pattern of manifestation in China and the western world.English poetry features narration,while Chinese poetry prefers simplicity.Due to different cultural background,Chinese and Western poems take their own characteristics in aspects such as poetry forms,images,allusions and rhymes.Therefore,poetry translation has always been a difficult field to tackle.Relevance theory believes that verbal communication is a cognitive-inference process and relevance is the only norm to understand discourse.By using the relevance theory as the framework,the author of this thesis analyzes both the informative intention and cognitive environment of the source text and the target text and studies how the translator recreates the original poetic lines in the target culture and achieves optimal relevance,paying not only to the acceptability and accuracy of the translation of these poetic lines.Through a detailed analysis of different informative intention and cognitive environment concerning poetry forms,images,allusions,and rhymes appeared in the poetic lines of Liaozhai Zhiyi,this thesis draws two main conclusions.First: for different poetic characteristics,different translation methods are adopted by Herbert Allen Giles to reach the optimal relevance such as strict mimetic form,literal translation,self-created form,loose mimetic form,amplification,replacement and annotation.Second,relevance theory can be applied to evaluate the quality of poetry translation.