A Report On The Translation Of The Dialogues In The Mystery Of Cloomber Under The Guidance Of Relevance Theory

The Mystery of Cloomber is one of the early detective fictions of Arthur Conan Doyle,the father of English detective fictions,first published in Pall Mall Gazette in 1888.The writing career of Doyle spanned the late period of the Victorian Era and the early part of the 20th century,and most of his works reflected the British social background,politics and economics of his time.This novel which is composed of 16 chapters tells the process of revealing the secret of Cloomber Hall in the setting of the countryside of Wigtownshire in Scotland,implying the author’s denouncement of the war,his perception of human nature and his endorsement to the concept of karma in Buddhism.Fictional translation is a main branch of literary translation,and the character utterance,as the core of a fiction,indicates personalities and psychological activities of the characters in different contexts.Furthermore,character utterance in the detective fictions has a stronger logic and intention,moving the plot along.Relevance theory treats translation activity as two individual but correlative processes of ostension and inference,involving in the original author,the translator and the target readers in the translation process.What’s more,the translator plays a crucial role as a bridge connecting the original author and the target readers.The maximal relevance principle holds that the intention of humans’ cognitive activity lies in achieving the greatest contextual effect with the least processing efforts.However,in the communicative activities,people always need to pay extra processing efforts so as to infer the real intentions of the communicator.To ensure the target readers achieve enough contextual effect with the least processing efforts,the translator needs to infer the real intentions of the source,deliver the original ostensive information to the target readers and eventually win the optimal relevance between the source and the translation text on the basis of the full interpreting of the original text.As a result,this report aimed at discussing the translation of the dialogues from Chapter Two to Chapter Seven in the above novel under the guidance of the relevance theory.According to the ostensive-inferential model of the relevance theory,the translator infers the communicative intentions of the source from relevant linguistic contexts,situational contexts,cultural contexts and other linguistic clues,and then fully delivers the original contextual effect to the target readers in order to achieve the optimal relevance by adopting literal translation,free translation,annotation and other translation strategies flexibly.The translator gets the following three findings from the translation report:Firstly,the translator can adopt different translation methods like literal translation,free translation,annotation and so on according to specific contexts under the guidance of the relevance theory.No matter which strategy is adopted,the common goal is to ensure the target readers can achieve enough contextual effect with the least efforts and realize the optimal relevance between the source and the translation.Secondly,the ostensive-inferential model has a guiding significance for the translator to explore the implication of character utterance and can guide such translation of character dialogues.Thirdly,the translator has referred to considerable literature and carried out some studies on relevant cultural backgrounds,some unclear Irish phrases and certain difficult expressions.Generally speaking,this translation practice widens the translator’s cultural horizons and is a kind of examination to the translator’s translation skills at the same time.