A Report On C-E Translation Of Land Of The Living(Chapter One-Four Of Third Part)from The Perspective Of Relevance Translation Theory

This report is based on the Chinese-English translation practice of the Chapter One-Four of the third part of Land of the Living written by the Chinese Intellectual Youth writer,Liang Xiaosheng.Land of the Living deeply portrays the lives of Chinese people and the great changes that have taken place in China over the past half-century,and it is titled “History of Fifty Years of Chinese People’s Life”.This masterpiece won the 10 th Mao Dun Literature Prize in 2019.Guided by the relevance translation theory,this report makes a summary and analysis of the translation of the excerpts.The target readers include researchers and literary readers who have needs or interests in the literature of Chinese historical changes.In relevance translation theory,translation is a dynamic two-round ostensive-inferential process,which involves the author,the translator,and the target readers.The principle of optimal relevance is the guiding principle.In the translation process,the translator,as the “middleman”,bears dual responsibilities.First,the translator needs to understand the author’s intention in the first round of ostensive-inferential process,that is,to clarify the author’s intention.Second,in the second round of ostensive-inferential process,the translator should consider the readers’ cognitive environment and convey the author’s intention,so that the readers could obtain sufficient contextual effect with minimal processing effort,achieving the optimal relevance.The significance of this report is to summarize and analyze the features of the source text and novel translation under the guidance of relevance translation theory,and demonstrate the application of the optimal relevance in terms of lexical,syntactic,and discourse through specific cases.Specifically speaking,on the lexical level,the literal translation could be combined with contextual interpretation for the translation of four-character structures;the translation of folk adages could be interpreted in combination with the context;the words with Chinese characteristics could be explained by adding relevant annotation in the text.On the syntactic level,the figurative sentences with Chinese cultural characteristics convert into the combination of the literal translation of the metaphorical word and simple explanation;clauses in run-on sentences could be reorganized logically and the appropriate logical connectors are added.On the discourse level,the overall coherence is mainly analyzed from the cue phrases in dialogues and complicated time nodes,the cue phrases involving the emotional change and action are added pertinently,and the time nodes are rearranged,in order to clarify the sequence of events.Under the guidance of the relevance translation theory,the translator summarizes the specific translation methods of the narrative novel,in order to provide some reference for the translation of this type of text in the future.