Translationof Cultural Iagesinm Luotuo Xangzi :A Study From The Prspective Of Relevance Teoryh

Translation is not only the linguistic conversion between two different languages but also the cross-cultural communication activity. Cultural images, as the carriers of a nation’s culture, are widely embodied in literary works. Thus, the translation of cultural images is inevitable during the literary translation. Taking as an example, Luotuo Xiangzi, a work with rich Chinese cultural flavor, this study makes a tentative comparative analysis of the translation of cultural images in literary works.Luotuo Xiangzi, as Lao She’s masterpiece, is famous for its local cultural flavor, profound environment description and vivid human images. Up to now, there have already been four English versions, which are different from each other in terms of the translation of cultural images. And this thesis takes the versions of Shi Xiaojing and Goldblatt as the objects of the comparative analysis. Based on Relevance Theory and the Relevance-Theoretic Approach to Translation, this thesis classifies cultural images into natural images, social images and human images. The three factors of ideology, cultural identity and religion, which may affect the translation of cultural images, are also discussed.Based on the ostensive-inferential nature of communication put forward by Sperber and Wilson (1986), the Relevance-Theoretic Approach to Translation emphasizes the translator’s right inference and understanding of the informative and communicative intentions of the original writer. Accordingly, the translator should create for the target languages readers a similar or even the same cognitive environment as the source language readers through context transference. Only in this way can the target language readers make the least efforts but gain the optimal relevance. In accordance with the above concepts, this thesis makes a comparative analysis of the two versions by Shi Xiaojing and Goldblatt, finding out that they both do great job in the quality of the translations because both of them have understood the writer’s intentions correctly. However, Goldblatt has done much better than Shi in handling details. Shi mainly adopts the domesticating strategy in order to make the translation much closer to the target language, while, Goldblatt is more willing to keep the features of the original language during the translation process. As a representative of the target language readers, Goldblatt’s version conforms better in the creation of cognitive environment and his language is more natural and authentic. Through the whole analysis, it can be inferred that the three factors of ideology, cultural identity and religion all affect the translation of the cultural images to some extent.It is finally concluded that it is the better way to spread Chinese culture abroad if the translator first truly understands the connotations of cultural images before he manages to maintain its linguistic forms and explain it with relative descriptions.