A Study On The English Translation Of Guanzhong Dialect In The Earthen Gate From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Jia Pingwa,a famous writer from Shaanxi province,has created many classic works.His works exhibit strong local characteristics and the flavor of rural life through frequently drawing on the medium of local dialect.However,for translators,rendering dialects into foreign languages poses a double challenge.First of all,scholars are still exploring the systemic translation of dialect,which means that within their praxis,translators have no firm theoretical guidelines upon which to draw.Second,local dialect possesses its own linguistic features.Forming an understanding of it usually takes translators a great deal of time and effort.Therefore,this thesis chooses The Earthen Gate translated by local scholar as its material for study and selects relevance theory as the theoretical support.In 1996,Jia Pingwa published The Earthen Gate which describes a story about urbanization of a village.It was translated to English by Hu Zongfeng,He Longping and Robin Gilbank and published by Valley Press in 2018.Hu Zongfeng,a famous translator from Shaanxi province,has a great passion for translation and has also made great contribution to the translation of Jia Pingwa's works.He has translated many works composed by Jia Pingwa,for example,Happy,The Country Wife,The Earthen Gate,and The Abandoned Capital(to be unpublished).In 1986,Dane Sperber and Deirdre Wilson proposed relevance theory,which contends that language communication is an ostensive-inferential process.Later in 1991,Gutt introduced relevance theory to the field of translation.He believes that translation is a dual ostensive-inferential process,and the aim is to seek optimal relevance.In the first process,translators should infer the intentions that the author of the source text wants to convey to the source text readers.In the second process,translators should select the proper translation methods to pass the author's intentions to the target readers.By using literature research and case study methods,and supported by relevance theory,this thesis analyzes Guanzhong dialect translation methods in The Earthen Gate.Two conclusions are drawn.First,Guanzhong dialect translation is a dual ostensive-inferential process.And the first ostensive-inferential process is the precondition of the second ostensive-inferential process for translators.Second,translators can find relevance from cultural,semantic and stylistic aspects in the understanding of Guanzhong dialect.And then after accurately assessing the cognitive environment and cultural background of target readers,translators should flexibly select proper methods to effectively translate Guanzhong dialect for achieving optimal relevance between target readers' expectation and source text author's intentions.