A Study On Translation Of Culture-loaded Animal Words In The Relevance-theoretic Account

The research of culture-loaded words is of great importance in translation studies in recent years. The culture-loaded meaning of words means adding the cultural flavor, such as history, customs and folks, geographic environment, etc. to the conceptual meaning of a word.Animals play an important part in human being's life. So do animal words in language. As the cognition of the category attributes is just the same, every nation may has similar cognition of the basic character of each animal, thus cause similar association about this animal and lead to the phenomenon of synonymous facts in culture-loaded meaning. Usually, this phenomenon is manifested in two forms, namely, same animal has same or similar culture-loaded meaning, or different animals have same or similar culture-loaded meaning. However, due to variable traditional habits, living customs, geographical environment, value systems, etc., culture-loaded meaning is mainly characterized by its discrepancy forms: exclusiveness in one culture; contradiction; divergence; and overlap in cultural-loaded meaning. Besides many cultural elements, the cognitive model is a factor that influences the culture-loaded meaning of animal words. As loaded with various cultural meaning, animal words are very difficult to be translated as the translator should not only convey the animal image appropriately but also make the translated version well-accepted by TL audience.Despite the difficulties, the relevance theory put forward by Gutt can be used to explain the translation phenomena and guild translation practice. Thus this thesis probes into the phenomenon of translatability of culture-loaded words and provides instruction for the translation of animal words, including translation principles and methods.First of all, translatability can be analyzed from the nature of translation per se. In the relevance-theoretic framework, translation is defined as an act of ostensive-inferential intralingual or interlingual interpretation of the source text. It is a dynamic process, an act of inferential verbal communication as is markedly different from other static descriptive approaches. And the success of communication depends on the identification of the other's intention by means of inferential model, in verbal communication or translation in particular. Translation is a kind of communication. In this sense, nothing is untranslatable; at least everything can be translated in some respects, to some degree, and by some methods.Secondly, the thesis concludes two basic principles in relevance-theoretic framework, that is, the translation should produce adequate contextual effects without putting the TL audience into gratuitous processing effort; and the translation should make the SL writer's intention and the TL audience's expectation meet. In fact, the translation principle concerns the task of translator.Thirdly, relevance theory provides two important methods for translation: direct and indirect translation. Both of them are instances of interlingual interpretive use. Indirect translation covers most of the continuum, and direct translation picks out the limiting case. They just differ in degree. The translator can choose the most appropriate means to search the optimal relevance. What determine the translator's choice of strategies are the SL writer's intention, the TL audience's expectation and to what extent the translated text resemble the original.