A Relevance-Theoretic Approach To Two Chinese Versions Of The Great Gatsby

The cognitive translation study is an integral part of translation studies. Along with the development of the cognitive linguistics and the cognitive psychology, the cognitive translation process has gradually attracted the attention of domestic and foreign scholars. Under the guidance of Relevance Theory, this paper attempts to explore the cognitive factors involved in the entire translation process by describing linguistic and cultural cognition of the translator, the background and intention of the original author, as well as the expectation of the target language readers and so on.Relevance Theory put forward by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson on the basis of Grice’s Cooperative Principle is the cognition-oriented theory on human communication, and with cognition and communication as the essence, it provides a reasonable analysis for the communicative and cognitive activities of humans. With further explanation of the theory and its application to translation practice by Ernst August Gutt, the influence of Relevance Theory has spread to the field of translation, no longer confined to the field of pragmatics itself. Translation is viewed as an act of interlingual and intercultural communication. As the cognition-oriented theory, Relevance Theory has a strong explanatory power on translation studies, which can help interpret the phenomenon of translation diversity, shed light on the translator’s subjectivity and reveal the operating process of translation from a cognitive perspective.Fitzgerald’s masterpiece The Great Gatsby is one of the American literary classics in 1920 s. Under the guidance of Relevance Theory, this paper intends to analyze the cognitive factors involved in the interactive and dynamic translation process by selecting two Chinese versions of The Great Gatsby by Wu Ningkun(1983) and Yao Naiqiang(2004) as corpus. A comparative analysis of two versions from the linguistic, cultural and stylistic perspectives provides the enlightenment that cognitive factors involved in dynamic construction of cognitive context, cognitive schema processing and translation strategy selection in the translation process will exert great influence on the output of translation. Therefore, it is significant for translators to constantly enrich their cognitive context and improve inferential ability to ensure the quality of translation.