Validity Of Metaphor Translation In Fortress Besieged In Light Of Relevance Theory

Relevance theory was put forward by the scholars Sperber & Wilson. People is looking for relevance during the communication activity and the success of it is decided by optimum relevance. Translation, being a kind of communicative speech act, is closely related to the inferential process of human brain. It involves not only language codes, but also the dynamic inferential process based on contexts. In the process of translation, two different languages set up relevance through two factors:one is contextual efforts; the other is processing efforts. The better contextual effect we have, the less processing efforts paid by the target audience, hence the higher relevance.Research on translation cannot be restricted on source text itself, but should be shifted to translation system mechanism. So the translation theory model based on relevance theory is to describe the process or act of interpretation—building grammar of translation. Through analysis of the two concepts univalent translation constituent and bivalent translation constituent, Professor Zhao Yanchun comes up with two types of inferential translation models: univalent translation constituent inferential model and bivalent translation constituent inferential model. As a result the basic point for translation is to adopt the conventional meaning of univalent translation constituent or the short-circuited conversational implicature of bivalent constituent, but leave conversational implicature for target audience to process. The translation validity depends on successful delivery of author’s communicative intention and satisfaction of the target audience’ expectation.Metaphor is essentially a cognitive phenomenon and a pragmatic phenomenon which takes word as the focus and context as the frame. Metaphor contains abundant connotations which involve things like language, culture, society, psychology religion and so on. The thesis tries to analyze validity of metaphor translation in Fortress Besieged together with fidelity in light of relevance theory from the angle oftranslation constitute. It will touch upon some useful suggestions for achieving validity of metaphor translation.