A Study On The Translation Of Children's Literature From The Perspective Of Relevance Adaptation Theory

Children's literature has important influence on children as it guarantees the mental health,sound growth and learning interests.The domestic children's literature,together with the supplement of foreign translated literature are meeting the needs of children's varied tastes in this rapidly changing period.Children need foreign literature to widen their vision and enrich their knowledge.Children's literature is a special literary genre which has both aural and visual differences from literature for adults.The particularity of target readers' cognitive process and linguistic ability will pose more difficulties for translators to translate children's literature.The author wishes that this thesis could arouse the attention from academia for the further study of children's literature translation.According to relevance theory,translation is a dual ostensive-inferential communication process.Translator,therefore,is both the listener and the speaker.As a listener,the translator should make appropriate inference of the original writer's communicative intention.As a speaker,the translator's aim is to reduce the target readers' processing effort.The translator should evaluate the target readers' reading ability before translating.When the translator predicts that the target readers cannot understand the version,ostensive stimulus should be used.According to Jef Verschueren's Adaptation Theory,language use is a process of making choices constantly to meet communicational needs.From the perspective of Adaptation Theory,there are differences between the source text(ST)and the target text(TT)in context,linguistic aspects as well as translators' consciousness and time.So it is difficult to reproduce information of the target text(TT).The enlightenment of dynamic adaptation to translation is that translators can use strategies flexibly and select proper methods to complete the translation of text based on the specific context of cross-cultural communication.The previous studies on Adaptation Theory weremostly applied in the field of linguistics,stylistics and sociology.Few are involved in literature,especially,children's literature.Based on the adaptation theory proposed by Verschueren and Deirdre Wilson's relevance theory,this thesis mainly uses descriptive method to make a study of the translation version of Harry Potter and Philosopher's Stone from the contextual correlates of adaptability and structural objects of adaptability.It attempts to study how the translators combine the relevance and receptive ability of children to make selections and adaptations in the translation process,which provides a brand new perspective for translation of children's literature.On the basis of adaptation theory and relevance development theory,the author chooses a large number of examples to make a comparison.Firstly,the author makes a discussion of adaptation to target readers' cognition and mental world from linguistic style and rhetoric devices such as simile and metaphor.Secondly,the author analyzes the translation version from cultural context.It makes a comparison between the two versions from different customs and religious belief.Finally,the author probes into the selections and adaptations which translators make in translation process at linguistic level.The theory has strong explanatory power for translation process.Translators of children's literature can make adjustable choices at any level of linguistic and super linguistic correlates to reduce target reader's reading effort.Children literature translators should develop their bilingual ability and bicultural vision to achieve this.