A Report On The Translation Of Civilizations Of The Song Dynasty Reflected In Paintings(An Excerpt)from Chinese To English Based On Relevance Theory

Chinese culture "Going Out" has become an important way to show China's image.At present,the main forms of Chinese culture "Going Out" depend on the translation of publicity materials and literature.The ways of Chinese culture "Going Out" and its content should be various.Therefore,translators have a long way to go to introduce Chinese culture to foreign country readers.Guided by the thought of Chinese culture "Going Out",the author of this thesis chose the first two parts of the fourth chapter from Civilizations of the Song Dynasty Reflected in Paintings for the completion of this translation activity.The selected text mainly introduces the collapse of the Fang Wall,the relaxation of the curfew rule,the city defense and the welfare institutions for beggars.The difficulties met in the translation activity are mainly about the translation of proper nouns and culture-loaded words which are loaded with rich cultural information.The cultural connotations hidden in the text should be manifest to the target readers with the effort of the translator's inference and verification.Therefore,relevance theory was selected to guide this translation activity.Relevance theory is about the pragmatics of cogn:ition and communication.Gutt directly applied it to the translation study.He believed that translation is the process of cross-cultural communication.During this process,translators could provide effective context for the target readers to find proper relevance through ostensive-inference.Based on the difficulties of proper nouns and culture-loaded words in the selected text,five translation strategies:transliteration plus annotation within text,transliteration plus annotation outside text,literal translation,liberal translation as well as substitution,were used to help the translator to convey the deeper communicative intention of the source text to the target readers and construct effective context for them to find proper relevance.Through this report,the author of this paper found that relevance theory is powerfully instrumental in the explanation of the translation of proper nouns and culture-loaded words.It provided huge help to solve the difficulties met in this translation activity from a macroscopic perspective.The author of the paper hope that this report will provide enlightenment and references to the translation of the related historical texts.