On Metaphor Translation In Fortress Besieged From The View Of Relevance Theory

This thesis explores the issue of metaphor translation in Fortress Besieged, the English translation of Wei Cheng, from the perspective of the Relevance Theory.Sperber and Wilson proposed Relevance Theory in the year of 1986. Relevance Theory concerns about the nature and the process of human verbal communication. It is based on the following state of affairs: every speech can be interpreted against a huge range of contextual assumptions, warranting a wide range of interpretations. But not all the possible interpretations are equally accessible to the audience. The audience is guided by something to the communicator-intended interpretation. What guides the audience in interpretation and understanding is relevance. That is, the audience pays attention to what is relevant. Relevance is defined in terms of contextual effect and processing effort. The greater the contextual effect achieved by processing a speech, the greater the relevance of the speech to the audience at that time;the greater the processing effort expended, the lower the relevance of the speech to the audience at that time. Relevance Theory claims that human communication is characterized by the search for optimal relevance, that is, to achieve adequate contextual effect without pulling gratuitous processing effort.Relevance Theory is not conceived for translation, but it is powerful to account for translation phenomena. The success or failure of translation depends causally on consistency with the principle of relevance.From the perspective of Relevance Theory, the process of translation consists of two rounds of communications, in which the translator plays a double role of both audience and communicator. As the audience in the first round, he needs to recognize the optimal relevance envisaged by the original writer and understand the original text in the right way. In the second round, he becomes a communicator and needs to express his understanding to the target readers in a way that is optimally relevant to them. Clearly, in each round optimal relevance is the principle of successful communication. Hence the transfer of optimal relevance from the original text to the target text becomes the translation principle.Since Aristotle's time, metaphor has been a heated topic for scholars in the west. The studies on metaphor in the west could be divided into three periods. They are:1) the period of rhetorical study on metaphor;2) the period of semantic study on metaphor and 3) the period of interdisciplinary study on metaphor. In this thesis, metaphor is stillstudied as a rhetoric device. Viewed from the Relevance Theory, metaphor is considered to be a sub variety of loose use of language. Optimal relevance is particularly crucial for metaphor translation because the interpretation of metaphor is a process of detection, discovery and resolution.This thesis holds that when doing the translation of metaphor, the translator should first form his or her own communicative information, that is, to what degree he or she intends to keep the original metaphor, then he or she should consider the cognitive environments of target readers and reconstruct the image in the original metaphor in a way that can ensure optimal relevance. No matter what method is used, as long as it complies with the Relevance Theory, and ensures the optimal relevance, it is an efficient one.Metaphors in the case study are collected from the famous Chinese novel Wei Cheng, or Fortress Besieged. Qian Zhongshu, the author, employs a great many biyu (simile and metaphor) and linguistic manipulations to create humor and satire along an essentially serious theme. In this thesis, only metaphors in the novel are discussed. And the metaphors are classified to three categories: metaphor in name, metaphor in caricaturing people and metaphor in describing things. This research attempts to: 1) combine the traditional metaphor study as a rhetorical device with the developing study of the Relevance Theory, and to provide a new approach for the study of metaphor and metaphor translation;2) evaluate the adequacy of the translation treatments and look into the reasons behind them;3) arouse people's interest in this great novel and its sole English translation.The study indicates that the translators, in most cases, have kept the image unchanged when they do the metaphor translation. Their communicative information is obvious, that is to offer target readers a chance to make processing effort and have the contextual effect by themselves. What's more, they also aim at introducing Chinese culture to their target readers. When analyzing the examples, the author of the thesis points out that cultural overlapping could be great help in achieving the optimal relevance, while in other cases, due to the cultural barriers and the constraint of the translators' knowledge of Chinese language and culture, the optimal relevance is not achieved.