Style Reproduction In Fiction Translation In Gutt’s Relevance Theoretic Approach To Translation

Since the beginning of translation,the reproduction of style has been discussed.Literary translation requires not only the translation of content,but also the proper translation of style.Different scholars,guided by different theories,have explored different translation methods to style reproduction from different perspectives.Relevance Theory,first put forward by Sperber & Wilson,was applied into translation by their student Gutt,which provides a new perspective for studying translation.Even though Gutt’s relevance theoretic approach to translation has been doubted by many scholars,one thing that cannot be denied is that it has strong explanatory power and can help us understand translation better.And the direct translation part even can provide us with new ways of translating style.In our study,we try not to define what style is for the reason that there are too many definitions of it and there’s no consensus on it.The author also explains that even though we do not define what style is,we can still study style translation.This study,by the use of case study,compares the two translation versions of The Sisters and The Dead in the Dubliners,the representative of stream of consciousness reflecting the characteristics of the day,and analyzes the translation from the lexical choice,syntactic structures,figure of speech,cultural information,emotional color,and register by the use of Gutt’s relevance theoretic approach to translation,especially direct translation in it.By doing so,the author aims to find out whether Gutt’s relevance theoretic approach to translation,besides its strong explanatory power,can provide some useful methods for style reproduction.And at last,this study points out the translation method— by maintaining communicative clues arising from the original work to make optimal relevance achieved,the reproduction of style can be achieved.