A Report On The E-C Translation Of Black Coral:A Thriller (Underwater Investigation Unit Book2) (Excerpts) Under Relevance Theory

Over the recent years,detective fictions have become one of the top bestsellers at the domestic and international level.Outstanding detective fictions have been increasingly introduced in China.As a result,the demand for translations of detective fictions is also growing.Detective fictions are considered to have a relatively low literary status as both detective fictions and the orthodox literary works share a huge stylistic difference.The translation’s quality of detective fictions does not seem to be ideal,thus the study on translation practice of detective fictions is in urgent need of innovation and further development.Based on Relevance Theory,this report takes an excerpt from Black Coral: A Thriller(Underwater Investigation Unit Book 2)by Andrew Mayne,a Wall Street Journal bestselling author,to analyze and study the English-Chinese translation of detective fiction.The book is telling about a diving policeman’s experience of solving a mysterious case,and is one of the most popular novels for foreign teenagers,which has an important research value,and there is no Chinese version.According to Relevance Theory,the author analyzes what and how is involved in the process of verbal communication from a cognitive perspective,and argues that translation is an ostensive-inferential communication process,while the ultimate purpose of communication is to find the optimal relevance and achieve the communicative intention.Nevertheless,the translator,in the first place,against the background of necessity for both translating detective fiction and offering theoretical references,introduces the main content,linguistic features and text types of this book and analyzes translation difficulties encountered in the target translation practice.The verbal communication’s process by which the translator takes into full account the author’s intention in the original text(or ST)and the reader’s receptivity in the translated text(or TT)is crucial to the quality of the translation of Black Coral,which is in accord with claims of Relevance Theory that 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 translated cases,it is demonstrated that the optimal relevance has been achieved by first,enlarging the translator’s cognitive context and the translator’s cognitive environment in logic information,encyclopedic information and lexical information;second,inferring ST author’s cognitive intention through direct translation to retain communicative clues from semantic representations,syntactic properties and figures of speech and indirect translation to adapt to dynamic context;third,catering for TT reader’s cognitive environment to convey ST author’s communicative intention by annontation,explicitation,substitution and paraphrasing;last,based on TT readers’ cognitive context to obtain maximum contextual effects by means of adaptation,negation translation,division & reconstruction and four-character phrases.Both the recipient of the original text and the communicator of the translated text is the dual role of the translator that the report tries to highlight by pointing out the significance of comprehension and expression in the translation process.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.The study,paying attention to the dispiriting task as to how to play the formidable role of the translator and reconciling the intention of the original text’s author with the expectations of the translated text’s reader of the target translation,so that translators can make positive preparations and appropriate compensations in translation of detective fictions,attempts to explore translation strategies and guiding principles that could be applied in the translation of detective fictions 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 detective fictions.