Translation Of Images Under The Relevance-Adaptation Model:a Case Study Of Rice

As a major means of cross-cultural communication, translation is confronted with the difficulty in transferring meanings between different languages and specific cultures. The Relevance-Adaptation Model is meant to reduce this difficulty. This thesis aims at using the Relevance-Adaptation Model to analyze the translation of images, so as to enlarge the study of image translation and achieve successful communication.This thesis first reviews the relevance and adaptation theory and their application in translation, through which their advantages and disadvantages are pointed out. By integrating the advantages, the Relevance-Adaptation Model comes into being, employing the interpretive power of relevance theory and the descriptive power of adaptation theory. Under this model, the translator stands at the center of cross-cultural communication:in the Discourse-Interpreting Communicative Process, he communicates with the original author and text, digging out the author’s intentions and finding the optimal relevance; in the Discourse-Producing Communicative Process, he communicates with the target readers, making choices to adapt to the target language and ensuring a cognitive consonance under the guide of optimal relevance. Thus translation becomes a process of seeking relevance and adapting it to the ways and manners of the target language and culture.Then, through an analysis of the origins and development of "image" in the East and the West, we find that "images" does not only include the cultural images but also the images branded with subjective feelings of the original author. Under the Relevance-Adaptation Model, the translation of an image is undertaken through the double turns’communication and gets improved in terms of detail and accuracy. Mi is praised as a "rice statue" of China and is called an "image novel". And the reason why Mi is chosen as the topic of this thesis is that this novel displays various splendid images:cultural images, images integrated with the original author’s subjectivity, especially the central images that are closely related to the theme and the development of the plots. Guided by the relevance-adaptation model in analyzing the translation of different images in the novel, the thesis focuses on the specific choices made by the translator for the purpose of adaptation in terms of the concrete cognitive environment and the contextual effects.In a word, this model has been well examined in the translating of images in Mi and it can also throw some light on the translation of other works. This study hopes to make us recognize how the mind works in cross-cultural communication and to improve our linguistic abilities, especially our translating ability.