A Report On The Translation Practice Of My Faraway Clear Peace River From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

My Faraway Clear Peace River is a Chinese novel written by Shi Tiesheng,a renowned writer in China.This translation report focuses on how to tackle the difficulties in translating the work under the guidance of Relevance Theory.Traditional translation theorists viewed translation as a decoding process from one language to another.However,in fact translation should be deemed as a communicative act that conveys both the meaning and culture.Thus,translators not only translate the meaning but also introduce the culture.In the work,the author employed many culture-loaded words,onomatopoeic words and structurally run-on sentences.All the three aspects caused the translation difficulties.The key concept of this theory is relevance that is defined in terms of contextual effects and processing efforts.From the perspective of Relevance Theory,translation is a process seeking for optimal relevance between target readers and the source text,which requires the translator to provide adequate contextual information for target readers and save their processing efforts.The author draws on the real life in Clear Peace River.In view of this novel,its words and sentences are the embodiment of his deep love to the villagers.As for the words,there are a lot of culture-loaded words and onomatopoeic words which describe the simple but pleasant life there.Under the guidance of Relevance Theory,the translator employed different translation strategies such as literal translation,explanatory translation and adding footnotes to translate culture-loaded words and used free translation and conversion of the word class to translate the onomatopoeic words.In terms of the structurally run-on sentences,the translator presented both the logic and structure clues of the sentences for the readers through different strategies as the disconnection,consolidation and the linear translation.