A Study Of The Translation Of Wei Xiaobao’s Speech In The Deer And The Cauldron By John Minford From The Principle Of Optimal Relevance

Louis Cha, also known as Jin Yong among all the Chinese people in the world, is one of the most famous writers of martial arts fictions, or Kung fu fictions in China. He is also one of the top three Kung fu fiction writers; the other two are Gu Long and Liang Yusheng. Lu Dingji, translated as The Deer and the Cauldron by John Minford, is his last work, which represents his superb writing skills. Wei Xiaobao, or Trinket in the English version, is way too different from other protagonists portrayed by Louis Cha, who are fair-minded, upright and excellent in martial arts. All in all, Trinket can be regarded as an anti-hero in Kung fu world. However, not only did he survive in that fierce Kung fu world, i.e. Jianghu in Chinese, but also turned out to be a favorite with people from all levels, for instance, the Emperor Kang Xi, the officials and the people from Kung fu world. His personalities are well displayed by the writer, which includes local dialects, idioms, jokes and speech in formal circumstances. This novel was translated by John Minford, a noted Sinologist in Britain, who once translated many traditional Chinese novels, like The Story of the Stone (with David Hawkes), The Art of War and Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, etc. The Deer and the Cauldron was translated within5years. A degree of excellence can be seen from Minford’s version, due to his rich experience in translating traditional Chinese novels into English.As an interdisciplinary theory, relevance theory gives a comprehensive and all-round explanation in translation studies. According to this theory, translation is an "ostensive-inferential" communicative activity which contains two steps, i.e. two "cognitive-inferential" processes, during which the translator is not only an audience, but also a communicator. Ernst-August Gutt put forward the optimal relevance principle based on this theory. He holds that the translator should deliver the optimal relevance in translation. Both the communicative intentions of the original text and the cognition ability should be taken into consideration to transfer the optimal relevance by means of proper translation skills. Thus, the readers of the translated text are able to get the meanings more easily.The author intends to study the translations of the protagonist’s speech guided by the principle of optimal relevance, analyses and summarizes the skills adopted by John Minford, the translator. Based on the principle of optimal relevance, any translation skill is inseparably connected with each other, so as to deliver the optimal relevance to the target readers. Strategies like supplement, annotation, paraphrase, replacement are employed by the translator; sometimes, he even omits some words so as to transfer the communicative intentions from the source text to the target readers.