A Report On The English To Chinese Translation Of The African Slave Trade And Its Remedy(Chapters 3 And 4) From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

The report serves as an in-depth reflection upon and an in-person summarization of the thesisoriented project undertaken by the reporter who has finished translating from English into Chinese two selected chapters taken from The African Slave Trade and Its Remedy authored by the British writer Thomas Fowell Buxton.Throughout the translation process,the relevance theory proposed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson is most often referenced as the guidance in order to obtain the optimal relevance and maximum relevance between the source text and the target text while adequate attention is given to the syntactic,lexical and rhetorical aspects to achieve the best possible effects in the target language.In the section of case studies,the translator,guided by the cognitive relevance principle of relevance theory,keeps close track of the informative intention and communicative intention of the original author to make sure that the target text is as faithful and relevant as it can be to the source text both in form and in content.The report unfolds itself in a sequential order that deals with the issues commonly seen in translation with a special focus on those highly complicated sentences and often-employed rhetorical devices—simile and personification.As many sentences in the source text are direct or secondary quotations or speeches taken from dialogues or letters,they are relatively explicit with hardly culturally-loaded undertones and as the translation of the original piece is intended for Chinese readers interested in African slave trade to learn more about the historical facts,the translator must fully consider the true intention of each communicator involved and pay special attention to the best relevance between the source text and the translated text.In this regard,relevance theory best serves the purpose,because it attaches great importance to the original speaker’s communicative intention and the readers’ cognitive context.Thus,relevance theory is an ideal guiding theory for this translation practice.In the light of relevance theory,the translation principles that the translator adheres to are distinguishing primary and secondary importance,making moderate reasoning and minimizing the reasoning efforts of the target readers on the basis of faithfulness to the original and with an aim to increase the degree of relevance between the author’s informative intentions as well as the target readers’ understanding and expectations.Therefore,various translation methods are flexibly used to achieve the maximal relevance,such as addition of in-text annotations or footnotes,transliteration,conversion,recasting and cis-sentence translation.