Relevance And Adaptation: A Study On Chinese Translation Of Bible And Theoretical Strategies

As classical scriptures of Christianity, the history of Bible translation is accordingly essential components of western civilization. As it is, the thousands of years of Bible translation practice in China have produced considerable influences on Chinese culture and it constitutes a key part in the history of Chinese translation. However, Bible translation in China has undergone twists and bounds due to historic and political factors that resulted in plentiful evidence of inadequacy in the existing Chinese versions of Bible. The scholars mainly made efforts to describe the ideology of scripture itself in terms of religion or view the Bible as a pure literary work. And Nida's dynamic equivalence theory has been repeatedly applied as prototype of strategy in translating. It should be self-evident that translation activities inevitably take place within language systems and therefore they must be governed and bound by linguistic property shared across human languages. Unfortunately, few Chinese scholars devoted to Bible translation have ever attempted discussing the translation analysis and exploring the related strategy in the domain of the linguistics, let alone pragmatics.Thus a gain of regretful knowledge of existing problems and clear deficiency shown through previous Bible translation practice, the author takes the ambition to try a new approach inspired from and guided by Sperber's and Wilson's Relevance Theory and Verschueren's Adaptation Theory. For convenience, the author prefers to give the Approach the name RATA (Relevance and Adaptation Theoretical Approach). In implementation, the theoretical framework aims at objectively describing translation process as well as evaluating results of translation in view of Chinese Union Version (CUV) and Today's Chinese Version (TCV). RATA is understood as a cross-cultural and translator-centered theoretical paradigm. Productively, the paper takes samples from CUV and TCV as targets for analysis, thus to find instances of errors, mistakes or inadequacy, to prove the usefulness of RATA. According to RATA, translating in nature is both a relevance-seeking, ostensive-inferential process and a dynamically-adjusting process. On the one hand, the translator mobilizes his cognitive resources available and develops his subjectivity to search for the optimal relevance in the source cognitive environment; on the other hand, he makes dynamic adjustment in the target cognitive environment by making appropriate linguistic choices in a variable, mediating and adjustable way.The thesis is constituted of five chapters. The first chapter provides the significance and methods of study. The second presents a brief introduction to the Bible and historical review of the Bible translation in China. The third chapter offers a detailed explanation about the CUV and the TCV. The forth chapter gives theoretic account of translation process including relevance theory, adaptation theory and a new theoretical approach--RATA in the present research. The core part is to make tentative proposal of RATA to the Chinese Bible translating process from the perspective of social-cultural, linguistic and physical context by the examples analysis in CUV and TCV.The conclusion of the thesis is to point out the findings and limitations of RATA applied into the Bible translating process, and restate that during the Bible translation the translator should take relevance as his criterion, adaptation as his method under the guidance of RATA.