On The Transmission Of Cultural Image In C-E Translation Of Metaphors In Fortress Besieged From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Cultural image is the part of a nation’s culture that embodies the wisdom and intelligence of its people and highly displays its national identity and characteristics. In C-E metaphor translation practice, communication failures caused by the mechanical application of Chinese cultural pattern into English have always been a problem to which translators and readers pay enough attention. It is not the case, however, to the long-standing phenomenon of cultural loss in C-E metaphor translation.With collected examples from Fortress Besieged and its English version translated by Jeanne Kelly and Nathan K. Mao, this thesis mainly studies the C-E translation of metaphors with abundant images from the perspective of Relevance Theory, with the aim of finding the coping strategies and methods in the transference of cultural image in C-E metaphor translation. In the relevance theoretic framework, translation is an act of communication carried out between two different cultures through the medium of language, being defined as interlingual interpretive use. In relevance theoretic account of translation, Gutt defines two types of translation-direct translation and indirect translation. He points out that due to the open-endedness and indeterminacy of implicatures of metaphorical language, the explication of any particular implicature or sets of implicatures would have a distorting influence. The direct translation strategy defined by Gutt stresses the preservation of all and only the’communicative clues’of the original, which will guide the target readers to the intended interpretation; while the indirect translation aims at yielding the intended interpretation which resembles the original in relevant aspects without putting the target readers to unnecessary processing effort.In the English translation of Fortress Besieged, different strategies are employed according to the characteristics of different cultural images. On the whole, it is apt to direct translation, a strategy to retain the original flavor of source culture. Viewing from the effects of cultural image transference, the translators’employment of translation strategies and methods has gain and loss. For example, when the cultural image in source metaphor cannot be identified by the English readers’cognitive environment, although it retains the source image, the method of literal translation with annotation causes great processing effort on the part of target readers; while the method of amplification, on the other hand, better conveys both the image and its cultural implications.Based on Relevance Theoretic account of translation and with the aim of achieving a maximal transference of cultural images in metaphor translation, the thesis finds out that when the source image is identified by the cognitive environment of target readers when processed in the source writer’s intended context, it is essential to adopt the direct translation strategy so that the "communicative clues" of the original will guide the target readers to the intended interpretation; when the source image is rejected, the strategy of reproducing the same image plus the explication of the part of implicatures that are most relevant to the context is proposed as the first choice, so that the inevitable cultural loss in such a case would be diminished to the lowest degree.