A Case Study On The Translation Of Harry Potter And The Sorcerer’s Stone From The Perspective Of The Relevance Theory

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is a piece of children’s literature written byJ．k．Rowling—a famous British female writer. The past studies of the novel mostlyfocus on the different elements behind its success. The translation studies arecomparatively less, which are mainly from the perspectives of Skopos Theory,Reception Theory, etc.The Relevance Theory is proposed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson.According to the theory, translation is a dual ostensive-inferential communicationprocess, including original writer and translator; translator and target readers. Translator,therefore, is both the listener and the speaker. As a listener, the translator should makeappropriate inference of the original writer’s communicative intention. As a speaker, thetranslator’s aim is to reduce the target readers’ processing effort. The translator shouldevaluate the target readers’ reading ability before translating. When the translatorpredicts that the target readers cannot understand the version, ostensive stimulus shouldbe used.The thesis mainly studies the translation in the version co-translated by MaAinong and Cao Suling(Su Nong in brief)，aiming to find out the guiding andexplanative power of the theory, which is demonstrated from positive and negativeaspects. Study finds out that in order to reduce the target readers’ processing effort, thetranslator has his style in language selection, the dealing with culture-loaded words andconcrete translation techniques. For example, the language is simple with numerousonomatopoeia and overlapping words, which can help the target children spend lessprocessing effort for they are in the stage of concrete thinking. The translator is inclinedto domestication when dealing with culture-loaded words, which can reduce theprocessing effort of the target children because they are more familiar with their nativeculture. Meanwhile, many annotations, additions and explanations can also be found,which can achieve the same purpose. As a listener, the translator makes some mistakes in making inference of the original author’s communicative intention. As a consequence,problems such as misinterpretations, omissions are made.