| Along with the advance of China’s "going global" and "bringing in" strategies amid the trend of globalization,China and the rest of the world have seen intensified intercultural communication through translation of historical works.The present report is devoted to the study of English-Chinese translation of historical texts based on relevance theory,taking the translation practice of Fifty Years in Amoy or A History of the Amoy Mission,China as a case study,to explore translators’ subjectivity.The translator,in the first place,against the background of necessity for both translating historical texts and offering theoretical references,introduces the content,linguistic features and text type of this book and analyzes translation difficulties encountered in this practice.This volume intends to arouse a deeper interest and respect for the Amoy Mission,which highlights the necessity of accurate representation of historical facts,vivid descriptions and emotional appeal in translation.Faced with translation difficulties in religious,historical and local culture,it is considered that translators’ subjectivity in perceiving the source text(hereafter ST)author’s intention and attending to acceptability of target text(hereafter TT)readers would be the key to qualified translation of this book,which conforms to claims of relevance theory which views translation as an ostensive-inferential cognitive process to realize the optimal relevance between ST author’s intention and TT readers’ expectation,thus its applicability to this translation task is illustrated.Through making an in-depth analysis of some typical translation cases,it is demonstrated that the optimal relevance has been achieved by first,updating translator’s cognitive environment in inference of names of people and places,and inference of historical and cultural terms;second,accessing ST author’s cognitive context through direct translation to retain communicative clues and indirect translation to adapt to dynamic context;third,perceiving ST author’s communicative intention to bring out implicature by explicitation and optimizing degree convergence by substitution;and last,catering for TT readers’ cognitive context to obtain maximum contextual effects by means of pragmatic,cultural and aesthetic compensation.By indicating the importance of understanding and expression in the process of translation,this research emphasizes dual roles of translators as both the recipient of the ST and the communicator of the TT.Through fully exerting subjectivity,it is expected to render the target language reader-oriented and achieve the optimal relevance.The report is expected to analyze specific methods applied in typical cases selected from this translation practice,and remind translators engaged in translation of historical works to leverage subjectivity to maximum advantage.The research,sharing the concern of the daunting task as to how to exert a powerful role of the translator and gear the intention of the ST author to the expectation of TT readers,so that translators can make positive preparations and appropriate compensations in translation of historical texts,attempts to explore translation strategies and guiding principles that could be applied in the translation of historical works under the guidance of relevance theory and hopes to propose advisable suggestions,offer academic support,practice analysis and theoretical references to translators engaged in this field,and inspire further research in translation of historical texts and application of relevance theory. |
