A Study Of Culture-Loaded Words Translation In Fortress Besieged From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Fortress Besieged is a great novel by Ch’ien Chungshu, who uses a number of culture-loaded words. Its English version was published in1979. The translation has been a controversy since its publication. Some scholars give high praise while some others think that the translation fails to make culture adjustment, which make it difficult to understand. Many scholars analyze the translation of culture-loaded words from various theories, but few papers analyze it from the Relevance Translation Theory. So this thesis analyzes the translation of culture-loaded words in Fortress Besieged from a cognitive theory-Relevance Theory in order to shed more light on the discussion of translation of culture-loaded words in Fortress Besieged.In this theory, translation is a special communication which involves two processes and three parties. In the first process, the writer as a communicator gives stimulus and the translator as a receptor infers the writer’s informative and communicative information. In the second process, the translator as a communicator makes an assumption of the receptors’cognitive environment and translates relevant information. The criterion of translation is the principle of relevance. As long as the receptors can gain contextual effect, the translation has relevance with the receptors’cognitive environment. A good translation is one that achieves optimal relevance, which makes the receptors achieve enough contextual effect without putting them into gratuitous effort. But some scholars criticize that under the guidance of Relevance Theory, translation is assimilation especially for the translation of culture-loaded words, because translators tend to use some expressions which are familiar to the target readers. So this thesis is also a test of whether Relevance theory can effectively guide the translation of culture-loaded wordsFrom the analysis of translation methods of culture-loaded words in Fortress Besieged, the author summarizes the translation methods: transliteration, literal translation without annotation or paraphrase, literal translation with annotation, literal translation with paraphrase, free translation, substitution and omission and gives a comment of these translation methods from the Relevance Translation Theory. At the same time, the author concludes that translation methods under the Relevance Theory are various and "assimilation" is just a small part of it. Relevance Translation Theory provides a unified framework for translation. Both direct and indirect translation methods can be used in terms of culture-loaded words translation from the Relevance Theory.