On The Translation Of Culture-loaded Words In Fortress Besieged From The Perspective Of RT

With the rapid development of economic globalization, the communication among countries becomes more frequent. Translation, which serves as the bridge of communication becomes even more important. However, on account of diverse historical background, lifestyle, customs, a large amount of culturally-loaded words crop up, which pose a barrier to translation. These culturally-loaded words vividly reflect unique features of Chinese culture, while they get in the way of cross-cultural communication. Faithfully rendering culturally-loaded words will be conducive to appreciating Chinese culture by English readers. Therefore, it is of great significance to study the translation of culturally-loaded words.Relevance theory was designed to describe cognition in human communication, which has provided a reasonable and unified framework for translation. According to relevance theory, the goal of human communication is to achieve optimal relevance. It also maintains that translation is a special kind of communication, which involves two cultures. Translators are expected to find the relevance between the communicative intention of the original writer and the audience for the sake of successful communication. Culture default caused by the appearance of culturally-loaded words is a barrier to translation and communication. Qian Zhongshu's Fortress Besieged was highly acclaimed by scholars both at home and abroad, which is, to a large extent, attributable to the frequent use of Chinese culturally-loaded words. The translation of these culturally-loaded words by translators also got great praises.This thesis aims to discuss the rendering of culturally-loaded words from the perspective of relevance theory. Although relevance theory originally was designed to describe cognition in human communication, it has provided a reasonable and unified framework for translation.After classifying culturally-loaded words in Fortress Besieged into five groups, the paper examines and analyzes translation strategies for handling culturally-loaded words in Fortress Besieged. Besides, two criteria governing the translation of culturally-loaded words are tentatively put forward in this paper: First,in translating culturally-loaded words, if the original writer and the target text reader lack common cognitive environment, the strategies taken by translators are expected to ensure that the translation will help target text readers understand enough contextual effects. In other words, translators are supposed to choose the translation strategy that is in line with the search for optimal relevance in that particular context. Secondly, it is much better for translators to get familiar with the importance of the cognitive environment into which they are translating, not only in terms of the content t, but also with respect to the nature of the whole act of communication.