A Relevance-Adaptation Theoretic Perspective On The Translation Of Chinese Idioms In The Two English Versions Of Hong Lou Meng

Idioms are a kind of vocabulary in Chinese, which is characterized by meaningful connotation and explicit language and fully demonstrates a nation’s profound cultural treasure. In literary works, the source text author usually uses many nation-featured idioms in order to transfer meaningful cultural information. Since the use of idioms may be influenced by such factors as history, society, culture, cognition and so on, in Chinese-English translation, how to effectively transfer the original cultural connotation of those Chinese idioms is one key to successful translation. And the other key is to how to keep the original characteristics of the source idioms when being translated.Relevance Theory, put forward by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, analyzes the speech acts of human beings from cognitive and pragmatic perspective and regards human beings’communication as an ostensive-inferential process, their student Ernest-Agugst Gutt thinking that the translation process is full of cognition and inference. Relevance theory holds that the translator plays the core role of a mediator, who must take target readers’cognitive capacity and cognitive environment into account so as to provide the best context for the readers and reach the optimal relevance in translation. Verschueren’s adaptation theory explores the use of language from a new perspective and method. The adaptation theory emphasizes that the process of people’s using language is the process of making changeable choices on language which is based on the inner and outer factors of language. Language is characterized by variability, negotiability and adaptability, which indicates that the application of adaptation must be a dynamic process.Scholars in China and abroad summarized the advantages and complementarities of relevance theory and adaptation theory and attempted to set up relevance-adaptation theoretic perspective, aiming to explain the process of translation from a new perspective. Translating activity is itself a very complex communicative process, an ostensive-inferential process, Translation is connected to the ostensive-inference among the source text, source-text readers, translator, the target text and target-text readers. In order to make the target text closely reflect the original intention of the original author, i.e. the best communicative effect, relevance theory provides the best explanatory power. At the same time, since the translating process is what language is chosen and used, context plays a very important role in language use. Different readers may see the same text from different lights. In this case, it is impossible to equate the original text with the target text. To make the target-text readers have the same reading feelings as the source-text readers do when they read the corresponding texts, translators have to consider the adaptation of language in the course of translation, while the adaptation theory hereby offers very persuasive theoretical supports.To explore the idioms translation in Hong Lou Meng, the paper attempts to combine the relevance theory and the adaptation theory into the relevance-adaptation theoretic perspective as the basic theoretical support. Considering the historical, social and cultural background of idioms, the paper also discusses the feasibility of employing adaptation to idioms translation under the mode of optimal relevance. Based on former researches, the paper selects some popular idioms, such as set phrases, proverbs, colloquialisms and two-part allegorical sayings appearing in the first80chapters in Hong Lou Meng as the researching object, summarizing the different processing methods of Chinese idioms and analyzing their advantages and disadvantages. At last, the author tries to put forward her own understanding and viewpoints on the translation of idioms.