A Study Of Translating Sichuan Dialect Words In Si Shui Wei Lan From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Li Jieren was a famous writer from Sichuan,and many of his literary works are full of stories with dialectal characteristics and ethnic culture.Among them,the representative work is Si Shui Wei Lan,telling the story of the life of ordinary people in Sichuan before and after the signing of the Boxer Protocol,reflecting Sichuan’s real history and culture.There are currently two English translations of the novel,the first translated by Hu Zhihui and published in China Literature Press in 1990,and the second jointly translated by Bret Sparling and Yin Chi and published in the University of Hawaii Press in 2014.Many words in the Sichuan dialect,which are diverse and bear a strong cultural imprint in Si Shui Wei Lan,is certainly a significant challenge for the translator.Relevance Theory was proposed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson in 1986,who argued that human cognition tends to use minimal efforts to obtain maximal contextual effects.And Ernest-August Gutt proposed the Relevance Theory of Translation in 1991,arguing that translation is a verbal communicative act,an inferential process closely linked to brain mechanisms,which contains two ostensive-inferential processes.The first process is for the translator to infer the author’s communicative intention and contextual assumptions,and the second process is for the translator to choose an appropriate translation strategy based on the inferred information so as to convey the author’s communicative intention to the reader.This thesis adopts a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods,using a self-constructed Chinese-English parallel corpus of 314 dialect words to study.Firstly,the author made a statistical classification analysis of dialect words;secondly,the author categorized and counted the translation strategies of two translators and discovered some mistranslations.And finally,some comparative case analyses are made.The results of the study show that,from the whole,Hu’s version tends to standardize dialect words and dilute their features to make them easier for readers to understand,while Sparling’s version tries to preserve the cultural characteristics of the dialect itself,thus using literal translations as much as possible to reproduce linguistic differences and spread dialect culture.From the dialect word categories,firstly,words of property and state,words of speech and movement,and words of material are used frequently,in large numbers and with simple grammatical structures,so they are applicable for literal translation and transliteration with annotation.Secondly,words of society and culture contain more cultural information,so amplification,transliteration or explanation are applicable.Third,words of time and direction are more uniquely expressed in Sichuan dialect,so substitution and free translation are applicable.Fourth,words of appellation,with complex and large systems,are applicable for substitution and omission.The grammatical structure of dialect words of approach and degree is unique,and words are out-of-the-ordinary,are suitable for free translation.Under the perspective of Relevance Theory,for different categories of dialect words,translators need to consider the different cognitive environments of readers and the characteristics of various types of dialect words,transmit contextual information that readers can easily understand,adopting different translation methods,so as to enhance contextual effects,reduce readers’ inferential efforts,and finally achieve the optimal relevance.