Critique On The Translation Of Culture-specific Items In The Story Of The Stone From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Hongloumeng is a masterpiece of Chinese classical novel, whose English versions have delivered far-reaching influence since inception, attracting a large number of scholars to conduct in-depth research. The translation strategies applied to deal with its culture-specific items is worthy of discussion.Spanish scholar Javier Franco Aixela first proposed the concept of culture-specific items. Aixela defined culture-specific items as those textually actualized items whose function and connotations in a source text involve a translation problem in their transference to a target text.Relevance theory is an inferential theory of communication, which aims to explain how the audience infers the communicator’s intended meaning. The relevance-theoretic explanation of these inference processes is rooted in an account of cognitive environments and optimal relevance.Ernst August Gutt introduced relevance theory into translation studies, seeing translation as a kind of communication with the involvement of authors, translators, and readers. Translators perform both the role of a hearer and a speaker in this dual ostensive-inferential communication with the responsibility to provide optimal relevance for target readers.Taking the English version of Hongloumeng, The Story of the Stone, as a case study, this thesis analyzes its translation of culture-specific items from the perspective of relevance theory. Relevance theory proves to be well applied in explaining translation behaviors and be qualified to serve as a set of evaluation standards for translation.