A Study Of The Translation Of Conversations In Uncle Tom’s Cabin From Relevance-Theoretic Perspective

Literary translation plays an important role in promoting cultural communication and social progress.Conversation as one of the most important constituents of a literary work,can contribute to deploying the story plots,presenting the characters’ personality,and revealing the theme.It can also reflect the author’s intentions and endow stylistic values to the work.Therefore,preservation of stylistic values and representation of the author’s intentions are vital for conversation translation.Relevance theory,a cognitive pragmatic theory on verbal communication,has been widely applied in analysis of conversation and conversation translation.It proposes that communication is an ostensive-inferential process aiming on optimal relevance and emphasizes the importance of inference and context,and in elaboration of the inferential process,it distinguishes explicatures and implicatures,all of these propositions are expected to shed some new light on conversation translation.The thesis makes a comparative analysis of translations of conversations in Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Huang Jizhong and Wang Jiaxiang from the perspective of relevance theory,focusing on preservation of stylistic values and representing the author’s intentions in the target language.Since verbal communication is intended to convey a set of explicatures and implicatures,this thesis makes the exploration of analysis of translation from these two aspects.For explicatures,a series of linguistic properties of semantic ones such as addressing terms and attitudinal expressions,phonological ones such as focal stress,and ambiguous expressions are analyzed respectively;for implicatures,the analyses are conducted on a variety of linguistic properties including those constraints on implicatures such as discourse connectives,those which make contribution to implicatures such as dialects,those which only have implicatures such as formulaic expressions,and those which embody a wide range of attitudes and emotions such as poetic expressions.All instances are collected and analyzed for every kind of these linguistic properties.At last an integrated analysis of translation of a conversational text is fulfilled.Accompanied by these analyses,a few suggestions for English-Chinese translation practice are proposed and a brief evaluation of the strategies employed by the two translators is given.Firstly,in macroscope,conversation translation is a cognitive process where the translator infers the intentions of the author and represents them into the target language on the basis of appropriate estimation of the audience’s context.In order to acquire as much contextual information as possible,it is recommended to be conducted on a textual unit including the whole stretch of conversation and information before and after it.Secondly,in microscope,the three constituents of a concept,that are logical,encyclopaedic and lexical entries play indispensible roles in the process of conversation interpretation and representation.All of them are transported into the target language and then are reconstituted into a well-shaped concept that resembles the original one.A translator’s task is to ensure the resemblance of these concepts by ingenious deployment of the triad,and through the interactions of them with each other to represent a series of explicatures and implicatures without any distortion to the target audience.Lastly,the two translators employ different translation strategies.Huang Jizhong pays more attention to the encyclopaedic information and provides more complementary materials to make up for the contextual gap with more domesticating translations.Comparatively,Wang Jiaxiang pays more attention to the logical and lexical information and shows less consideration of the contextual difference,hence brings more foreignizing translations.These points are expected toshed some new lightonthe practice and evaluation of conversation translation and stimulate further research in this domain.