A Study On The Chinese Translation Of The English News Headlines From The Perspective Of The Relevance Theory

In the context of globalization, Chinese people are increasingly paying much attention tothe outside world. English news as a means of communication has received increasingattention in China, too. The news headlines can enrich the theme, so they are regarded as theeyes and souls of the news report. The news headlines are very influential. Accordingly therehave been researches on the Chinese translation of the English news headlines.The relevance theory was firstly proposed by French linguist Dan Sperber and Englishlinguist Deirdre Wilson in their co-edited book Relevance: communication and cognition in1986. This theory was based on American language philosopher H.P. Grace’s ConversationalImplicature which explained what is said and what is implied in an utterance; it was alsobased on English philosopher John. Langshaw Austin’s Speech Act theory which believed thatwhen one produced an utterance he did not state one thing but performed one or more actions.This theory had transferred the use of pragmatics to the field of cognition, so it was alsocalled cognitive pragmatics. It has been one of the most influential cognitive pragmatics theseyears, for its influences have reached far from the pragmatics field. E.A. Gutt firstly applied itto the translation studies. He believed that the relevance theory had a strong explanationpower to translation. Afterwards it has been further applied in the translation studies.This thesis is a tentative study on the Chinese translation of English news headlines fromthe perspective of the relevance theory. The data are mainly from the English speakingcountries’ network news and their Chinese translation versions like CRI Online, China Dailyand some other bilingual network news. Based on Li Xiaolin and Gao Qizhi’s classification ofnews headlines, the present thesis focuses on the Chinese translation of six kinds of Englishnews headlines–the social news headlines, the political news headlines, the economic newsheadlines, the entertainment news headlines, the sports news headlines and the festival andholiday news headlines.Based on the relevance theory proposed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, analysis ismade on the Chinese translation of various English news headlines. According to therelevance theory, communication is an ostensive-inferential process. The ultimate purpose of communication is to find the optimal relevance between the speaker and the audience. Hencea successful translation will have the optimal relevance between the original text and thetarget text. According to the relevance theory, there are five typical translation methods toachieve optimal relevance between the original text and the target text: the first one is tomaximize the contextual effects of the target text; the second one is to minimize theprocessing effort of the target text; the third one is to use the method of interpretiveresemblance; the fourth one is to find relevance by the communicative clues and the fifth oneis indirect translation.Being a tentative research on the application of the relevance theory, hopefully thepresent thesis may be helpful for further researches on the Chinese translation of Englishnews headlines.