On Two Chinese Translations Of The Comic Mafalda From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Mafalda is a comic strip created by the famous Argentine cartoonist Joaquin Salvador Lavado, better known by his pen name Quino. The strip features a 6-year-old girl named Mafalda, and a group of her friends. Through the witty words of the little protagonist, Quino tries to reflect the lives of the Argentinian middle class, their complaint and satire about the government and even deep reflections about humanity and the human society. This comic strip was first translated and introduced into China by the famous Taiwanese writer Sanmao. Later it was retranslated by two mainland translators. The two translations adopt different translation strategies in many details. This thesis aims to analyze and compare the two translations from the perspective of relevance theory.The relevance theory believes that translation is a special kind of communication, to be specific, an ostensive-inferential communication. The relevance theory can explain the pattern under which the readers understand the inferential meanings of the author, such as humor or sarcasm, and how they are translated after two rounds of inferences of the translator. The present essay tries to analyze and compare the two Chinese translations of Mafalda from the perspectives of validity and fidelity, to summarize the translation methods used to guarantee validity and in terms of fidelity, why and how it is sacrificed or preserved. The relevance-theory account of comic translation is an innovation to the traditional intersemiotic studies of this subject, and the present essay applies the relevance theory to comics, a relatively marginal form of literature.