A Report On The Dialogue Translation In The Novel From The Perspective Of The Relevance Theory

This report is based on the English-Chinese translation practice of Across the Winding River.The book,written by an American author Aimie K.Runyan,is a historical novel,revolving around the intertwined experiences of Max,Metta and Johanna during World War II in Germany.It describes a journey of finding love and family from different perspectives,which is a story of war and sacrifice,courage and perseverance,love and affection.Different from the traditional historical novels,this historical novel adopts the first person perspective to focus on the experiences of the three protagonists in a transformative way so as to reflect the history of Germany during the World War II.There is a large number of dialogues in the novel which are life-oriented,short and flexible.But they can play an important role in revealing the theme and conveying the character’s emotion.Whether the dialogues in the novel can be well translated is an important factor to measure the quality of translation.Based on the relevance theory,this paper explores how to reveal the informative intention and communicative intention of the original work under the influence of cognitive contexts between different languages.The optimal relevance for the target readers is built by using the ostensive-inferential model,which means that the readers can obtain optical contextual effect with less cognitive effort and get similar feelings as the source language readers.The results of this translation practice show that the relevance theory can be applied to the translation of dialogues in literary works.By combining the three components of cognitive context: situational knowledge,background knowledge and linguistic contextual knowledge,the author regards translation as a ostensive-inferential process,focusing on analysis of the specific meanings and implicit intentions of dialogues under the influence of different cognitive factors.With the original language clues and communicative clues,the author selects some translation methods and skills,such as ampification,omission,extension,substitution,conversion of part of speech and inversion,which can convey the contextual effect of the original text to the target language readers and improve the quality of the dialogue translation of novles.