Annotation In Translating Literary Works

This paper studies the use of notes in translating literary works from the perspective of relevance theory.Annotation is an important supplementary means of translation. In literary translation, especially translation of classic literary works, proper use of notes can dispel doubts, supplement essential background information, and explain specific translation techniques for the target text readers, so as to facilitate their understanding and appreciation of the target-language text.Nevertheless, in contrast to the popularity of annotation among practicing translators, little attention has been paid to its use in the theoretic circle, and the number of systematic and in-depth studies on the subject remains meagre.As a result, notes are used too liberally in the translation practice today. The concept of"note"is often confused with that of"footnote". And translators merely annotate the text at will with no consideration of the relevance between the additional information and the text.Relevance Theory, as an influential theory in pragmatics, was put forward systematically by Sperber and Wilson in 1986. In relevance theory, communication is taken as an ostensive-inferential process in which"the communicator produces a stimulus which makes it mutually manifest to communicator and audience that the communicator intends, by means of this stimulus, to make manifest or more manifest to the audience a set of assumptions"(Sperber & Wilson, 2001:63). This new model of communication, together with other basic notions of relevance theory is successfully exploited by Gutt in his relevance-theoretic study of translation.On the basis of some essential concepts of relevance theory and the findings of Gutt's study, this paper explores a relevance-theoretic framework for as well as some specific guidelines to the use of notes in literary translation through a comprehensive and systematic study on the subject. Moreover, the findings of the study are applied to the assessment of notes in literary translation through a case study of notes in the English translation of Fortress Besieged.