A Relevance-theoretic Study Of English Understatements And Their Chinese Translation

For a long time, I believed that understatement was only a special language phenomenon in English reflecting the reserved way of English people's life, but after observing some examples of English understatements, I find that understatement is not restricted to the cultural background, rather, it is a communication strategy widely used in English communication and literature. This thesis thus plans to examine the notion of understatement and the ways of translating English understatements into Chinese from the relevance perspective of communication. Most of the examples of English understatements are selected from D.H.Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover, the Chinese translations of which from the three existent Chinese versions of the novel.I divide the entire thesis into five chapters.Chapter one first examines the literature related to the study of English understatements and presents a new definition of understatement. It is necessary because the notion of understatement must be clarified since it is the theme of the thesis. Then, accordingly, the important relation between understatement and context is assumed and the question on how to translate English understatements into Chinese brought forward. The following chapters thus try to provide solutions to the above problems.Chapter two presents the characteristics of English understatements by analyzing the four ways of understatement formation and its five pragmatic functions in the communication. Through this step, the notion of understatement: its definition, its linguistic structure, and its functions have been clarified thoroughly and the importance of context has been found in the understanding of understatements.Chapter three is devoted to the theoretical basis of the translation of English understatements. Nida and Newmark's translation theories are discussed first. Though they both give insightful directions for translation, I still find them unable to provide a satisfactory one to the Chinese translation of understatements. Thus, I resort to the relevance-theory of communication developed by Sperber& Wilson and Gutt. The theory provides a new concept of translation, in which the interpretive nature of translation is stressed. The theory also recommends that the optimal relevance to the original context be achieved in the translation (interpretation) process. Therefore, due to the importance of...