A Report On E-C Translation Of Suspense Fiction The Best Of Friends(Excerpts) From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

As a significant literary genre,suspense fiction is famous for its meticulous logical reasoning,unexpected plot and tense atmosphere,which leads the readers to discover the truth of the story.It emphasizes detailed description of psychological activities and tense atmosphere,so as to immerse readers in the story.At present,there are inadequate practical studies on translation of suspense fiction,which is worthy of further study.The translator selects the American writer Lucinda Berry’s suspense novel The Best of Friends as the translation material.Based on relevance theory,the thesis analyzes E-C translation of the book from Chapter Twenty-Seven to Chapter Thirty-Three at lexical,syntactical and textual levels.Relevance theory was put forward by Sperber and Wilson,then applied to translation by Gutt.According to relevance theory,communication is regarded as an ostensive-inferential process.It aims to bring enough contextual effect with relatively low effort,so as to achieve optimal relevance.In relevance translation theory,translation is described as a double ostensive-inferential process.The translator should not only understand the author’s intention as a source language reader,but also spare no effort to reproduce similar contextual effect for the target language readers with low processing effort.Therefore,the translator should fully understand the author’s intention,then adopt different translation strategies to create similar contextual effect on the basis of target language readers’ cognitive environment and achieve optimal relevance.The original style could be fully reproduced and the author’s intention could be conveyed.The translator summarizes the linguistic features,then analyzes the source text and the translation at lexical,syntactical and textual levels.In order to reduce the readers’ processing effort and enhance the contextual effect,the translator adopts various methods at lexical,syntactical and textual levels.At lexical level,the translator adopts conversion,annotation,amplification and free translation.At syntactical level,the translator adopts division,inversion,negation and omission.At textual level,cohesion and coherence are adopted.The translator verifies the feasibility of applying relevance theory to the translation of suspense fiction,and strives to reproduce the original contextual effect through various translation methods based on the cognitive environment of the target language readers,so as to convey the author’s intention.Hopefully the thesis can provide reference for the translation of English suspense fiction.