On Translation Of Humanity Description From Perspective Of Relevance Theory

In 1986,Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson published the monograph Relevance: Communication and Cognition and put forward relevance theory concerned with communication and cognition.By combining communication with cognition,relevance theory not only promoted the development of cognitive pragmatics,but also provided a broader research space for pragmatic phenomenon and communication from a new perspective.According to relevance theory,language communication of human beings is an ostensive-inferential process of searching for relevance.Written by W.Somerset Maugham in 1918,The Moon and Sixpence tells a story that an British stock broker chooses “the moon” and abandons “sixpence”,reflecting the complicated humanity theme of different characters in the novel.A comparative study on translation of humanity description is carried out by adopting the mainland and the Taiwan versions of The Moon and Sixpence from the perspective of relevance theory.Humanity description is to be defined in Chapter Three in detail.The obvious humanity descriptions of the main characters in the novel are analyzed and their translation strategies in the cross-strait versions are compared with each other to analyze how our cultural background of different branches affects translation processes and tactics.Comparative analyses show that literal translation is more common in dealing with the translation of humanity description,and as well there are some other translation methods,such as free translation and additional translation.Additional translation is more common in the mainland version than in the Taiwan version,whereas free translation is more common in the Taiwan version than in the mainland version.The results show that a translator should firstly correctly understand the author's intention when translating humanity description,and then try to match the author's intention with the target readers' expectation for minimizing the processing efforts of target readers.At the same time,a translator should give full consideration to the cognitive environment of both the target readers and the source readers,and select suitable translation strategies based on the specific cognitive context to help the target readers find the optimal relevance between the original context and the target context so as to achieve the optimal communicative effect,that is,a translator should try to make the target readers achieve similar contextual effects as the original readers without paying unnecessary processing efforts.