| With the development of globalization, more and more people have realized the importance of cultural exchange between different nations. Many translators attempt to introduce Chinese culture to the Western world by translating Chinese classical works. Because of striking discrepancy between Chinese culture and Western culture, the problem of how Chinese culture-loaded words can be properly translated into English has become a headache to many translators.Relevance theory offers a new perspective for the translation studies of culture-loaded words. According to Gutt's relevance-theoretic account, translation can be seen as an act of ostensive-inferential communication, "more precisely, an act of interpretive use across language boundaries" (2004:211). To be consistent with the principle of relevance, translation should yield adequate contextual effects and put the reader to no unjustifiable processing effort in achieving these effects. In this thesis the author intends to make a comparative study of the translation of culture-loaded words in the two English versions of The Peony Pavilion from the perspective of relevance theory with the aim of finding whose translation has achieved optimal relevance.This thesis is mainly composed of four chapters.Chapter one is a literature review concerning the research topic of this thesis, including the studies of relevance theory, the studies of the translation of The Peony Pavilion as well as the studies of the translation of culture-loaded words.Chapter two is the theoretical framework of the research, in which the author discusses the basic concepts of relevance theory, and then mainly introduces Gutt's relevance-theoretic approach to translation.Chapter three is about the application of relevance theory to the translation of culture-loaded words, in which the author concludes that in line with the principle of relevance a successful translation of culture-loaded words should be of optimal relevance, that is to say it should yield adequate contextual effects without requiring the target reader to invest unnecessary effort in obtaining them.Chapter four is a comparison of the translation of culture-loaded words in The Peony Pavilion between Cyril Birch's version and Zhang Guangqian's version from the perspective of relevance theory. In terms of relevance theory, in most cases, Zhang Guangqian has made right inference of the original writer's intention and right assumptions about the target reader's cognitive environment, which makes his translations yield adequate contextual effects without putting the reader to unjustifiable effort in obtaining them. While most of Birch's translations fail to produce adequate contextual effect and make the reader invest unjustifiable effort in achieving them due to his inaccurate inference of the original writer's intentions and wrong assumptions about the target reader's cognitive environment. However, in a few cases, Birch's translations are more optimally relevant than Zhang Guangqian's translations because Birch makes a right decision on the resemblance between the original and the translation, which enable the reader to find adequate contextual effects with less processing effort.It can be concluded from the comparison that a larger part of Zhang Guangqian's translations achieve optimal relevance, and a smaller part of Birch's translations are optimally relevant to the target reader. The findings suggest that relevance theory not only can account for the translation of culture-loaded words, but also can be used as guidance on the translation of culture-loaded words. The success or failure of translation depends on whether the translator can follow the principle of relevance: "do what is consistent with the search of optimal relevance" (Gutt,2004; 124). The translator must consider the differences in the cognitive environments of the original communicator and the target reader so as to make the dual ostensive-inferential communication successful. In addition, to decide what the relevant aspects to reader are needed to be preserved the translator has to take into account of the likely contextual effects and processing effort. |
