A Report On The E-C Translation Of The Cambridge Companion To Modern British Culture From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

As a social phenomenon,culture is the product of long-term human creativity,and at the same time a historical phenomenon,an accumulation of human society and history.Therefore,the translation of cultural texts is of decisive importance for the dissemination and development of culture.This translation practice is based on an extract from The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Culture,which focuses on the various cultures of contemporary Britain.British culture today is the product of a shifting combination of tradition and experimentation,national identity,and regional and ethnic diversity.These distinctive tensions are expressed in a range of cultural arenas,such as art,sport,journalism,fashion,education,and race.Ernst-August Gutt(1991)pioneered the application of relevance theory to translation studies.And he points out that translation is a special kind of linguistic communication process,integrating the ostensive-inferential process in the relevance theory.Three communicators are inferred by him: the author of the original text,the translator,and the reader of target text.To ensure that the processing efforts made by the reader are commensurate with the contextual effects obtained,the translator must act as a link between the source text and the target text,as well as between the readers of them.This report summarizes the issues that come up during the actual translation process,as well as the translation methods and translation techniques used,in conjunction with the relevance theory.It analyzes translation based on the inference of the lexical,logical,and background knowledge in target reader’s cognitive environment.With lexical selection,collocation,and the usage of four-character patterns,the inferred lexical information in the original text is translated,reducing the processing efforts on the target reader and achieving the intended contextual effects.By shifting class,converting the voice,and reorganizing the information,the original text’s logic is examined.As a result,the target text becomes coherent and fluent,and the readers’ reading barriers are diminished.The annotation of proper nouns and rhetorical conversion are used to help the target readers understand the author’s intended meaning and to realize the communicative intention given the difference in background knowledge between the target readers and the readers of the original text.