On The Translation Of Culture-loaded Words From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory:A Case Study Of Ruined City

As a bridge of language interaction,translation plays an important role in cross-cultural communication.However,the different cognitive environment caused by the cultural differences between China and the west brings great challenges to translation activities.As the words which can best reflect the cultural information carried by the language and reflect the social life of human beings,the culture-loaded words have strong national color.How to translate the culture-loaded words,especially the cultureloaded words in literary works,is worth discussing.This paper selects Jia Pingwa’s novel Feidu,which contains a large number of culture-loaded words with national and local characteristics.The English version,Ruined city,is translated by the famous sinologist Howard Goldblatt.The culture-loaded words are divided into material culture-loaded words and non-material culture-loaded words.On the basis of relevance theory,this paper explores the translation methods and techniques of culture-loaded words and analyzes whether the ostensiveinferential process achieves the communicative intention and optimal relevance in translation.This thesis includes five chapters.The first chapter is the introduction,which introduces the background and significance of the research,and puts forward three research questions and main research methodologies.Chapter two is the literature review,introducing the research status of the Feidu and its translation Ruined City and the research status of relevance theory in the field of translation.Chapter three presents the relevance theory and its application in translation,which points out the guiding power of relevance theory in translation.As the main part of this thesis,chapter four introduces the definition and classification of culture-loaded words,and selects seven sub-categories from material culture-loaded words and non-material culture-loaded words:food,clothing,architecture in material culture-loaded words;language,art,religion,customs in non-material culture-loaded words.Under the guidance of relevance theory,this paper discusses Goldblatt’s selection of translation strategies and techniques through the analysis of 22 cases.Through analysis,this paper concludes that according to the cognitive environment of target readers,Goldblatt adopts different translation techniques to reduce the target audience’s processing efforts and convey the communicative intention of the source text to the target readers.When there is no equivalent or similar expression to the culture-loaded word in the reader’s cognitive environment,he adopts the techniques of paraphrase,amplification,substitution and so on to convey information,occasionally abandoning the cultural connotation when necessary.When there is an equal or similar expression in the reader’s cognitive environment,he adopts the techniques of literal translation,omission and other techniques to reduce the reader’s difficulty in accepting the information and achieve optimal relevance.Among all situations,the method of substitution and omission are most frequently used when the preceding or following text has a similar or identical expression.And in the translation process,Goldblatt adds sufficient relevant clues and reduces a certain degree of contextual burden of understanding.The author concludes that relevance theory can not only effectively guide translation activities and translation practices,but also can provide powerful theoretical support for translation activities and selection of translation methods and techniques.