| In translation practice, it is difficult to deal with specific linguistic orcultural features in the texts. Relevance theory introduces new angles ofpragmatics and cognition into the study of translation, and throws newlight on this problem. Translator plays both as a communicator and anaudience in translation, a process of double ostensive-inferentialcommunication. The process is the one of inference and searching forrelevance to yield optimal relevance. The choice of translation strategywould be based on the translator's assessment of the TL reader's cognitiveenvironment.This thesis tries to discuss relevance theory in translation practice.To illustrate the guiding value of relevance theory to translation, theauthor chooses the translations of Hongloumeng for case study. Byanalyzing different strategies that translators adopt to handlecultural-loaded terms, the author gives the conclusion: various translationstrategies can be justified in their own right; it is the translator's accurateassessment of the target reader's cognitive environment that more oftenthan not decides the specific translation strategies and means of achievingoptimal relevance.This thesis aims at arousing translators' awareness of applyingrelevance theory to translating literary works like Hongloumeng. In the first chapter, the author offers a theoretical account of relevance theory.Chapter 2 discusses the applicability of relevance theory to translation.Chapter 3 analyzes the translations of Hongloumeng from the linguisticperspective. Chapter 4 analyzes the translations of Hongtoumeng from thecultural perspective. It can be assumed that the ultimate evaluation for atranslation is whether it effectively conveys the original intention andwhether it yields optimal relevance in the target reader's cognitiveenvironment, while the means of achieving optimal relevance do not haveto be invariable. Meanwhile, the author hopes the discussion and methodsherewith in this thesis can, to some extent, shed light on translators intheir research. |
