On The Translation Of Zhuang Classics From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Northern Zhuang Opera extracts creative elements from folk tales.Its themes often celebrate the time of peace and prosperity,advocate the freedom of love and marriage,and propose the retribution of good and evil.Actively promoting the English translation of Zhuang Opera is an important form to protect the national culture and preserve the spirit of Zhuang nationality.Sperber and Wilson put forward Relevance Theory after they further study “Cooperative Principle”,which is the foothold of Grice’s Conversation Theory.From the perspective of communication and cognition,Relevance Theory provides new ideas for the studies of inferential models in communication.Relevance Theory holds that communication is an ostensive-inferential process and involves informative intention and communicative intention.Human language communication includes ostension and inference.“Ostensive” emphasizes that a speaker’s intention should be conveyed faithfully.“Inferential” emphasizes that a hearer can infer informative intention from the ostensive behaviors of the speaker.The purpose of language communication is to find the internal relevance of communication and try to achieve optimal relevance.Taking Relevance Theory as the guiding theory and Selected Readings of Traditional Dramas of Northern Zhuang Opera as the research object,this thesis aims to explore how to make the target language readers better understand the cultural connotation of Northern Zhuang Opera.It offers two questions in the research.Firstly,what should be considered by the translator in the process of translation? Besides,how to judge the relevance degree of a translation? After grasping the main points of Relevance Theory,this thesis explores the translation skills in Selected Readings of Traditional Dramas of Northern Zhuang Opera at the semantic,syntactic,aesthetic,and cultural level.In the process of translation,the translator should start from the cognitive context of the target language readers and give full consideration to their efforts and contextual effects in the inference.In order to make the target text more relevant in the cognitive context of the target language reader,the translator should choose the translated text that can make the target language reader pay less effort and achieve a stronger contextual effect.At the semantic level,the translator uses cognitive relevance to realize the maximum semantic cognition.When the translator uses communicative relevance,the target language readers will put adequate effort and understand the semantic meaning accurately.Therefore,it achieves optimal relevance at last.At the syntactic level,the translator violates the grammatical rules to restore the artistic features of the source language text.As a result,the target language readers can obtain the artistic enjoyment of the language.At the aesthetic level,the translator uses rhyme,context,and symmetrical form to restore the beauty in sound,sense,and form,which leaves a deep impression on the target language readers.At the cultural level,the translator establishes relevance in the cognitive context of the target language readers to overcome cultural vacancy and cultural differences.Hence he can convey informativeintentions and achieve cross-cultural communication.From the perspective of Relevance Theory,this thesis studies the English translation of Northern Zhuang Opera and opens up a new way for the English translation of Zhuang classics.It is hoped that it can promote translation studies of Zhuang classics,improve the translation quality of Zhuang classics,and realize the international exchange of the Zhuang culture smoothly.