A Study On Costume Name Translation In The Story Of The Stone From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Hong Lou Meng,one of the world-famous Chinese classics,is the epitome of traditional Chinese culture,of which costume is an integral part.And in terms of translation,David Hawkes’ is one of the most widely circulated English versions.From the perspective of Relevance Theory,this thesis analyzes the strategies for costume name translation in Hawkes’version.This thesis consists of five parts.The introduction mainly summarizes the research background,objectives and significance as well as the research methods of this thesis.The second part makes a brief overview of Hong Lou Meng and its English version The Story of the Stone and summarizes the development process and status of the research on the translation of traditional Chinese costume names.The third part is the theoretical framework,which gives a brief introduction to the main points of Relevance Theory,and the research history and present situation of the theory.The fourth part analyzes the strategies adopted by Hawkes in the translation of costume names under the guidance of Relevance Theory by classifying and analyzing the commonness of the collected materials.The last part is the conclusion,including major findings and limitations.Through the analysis of the translation of traditional costume names in Hawkes’ version,the main conclusions of this thesis are as follows:firstly,the process of choosing translation strategies is also a process of trade-offs between contextual effects of translation and processing efforts paid by readers.Hawkes’ translation not only conveys the original information,but also caters to the readers’ cognitive environment through the use of different translation strategies.Secondly,relevance is contextdependent,so translators should focus on the context in the original text and translate it reasonably.Hawkes adopted different translation strategies in the translation of material words and proper names according to the contextual information such as the thickness of cloth,the occasions,and the status of characters,to accurately convey the implicatures of the original text.Thirdly,translators should pay special attention to cultural information in translation.Hawkes removes almost all culture-specific words in costume names,which reduces reading barriers to a certain extent,but causes the information in the translation to be inconsistent with the original text,hindering the spread of culture.Nowadays,given the context of advocating Chinese culture "Going Global",how to reasonably translate culture-specific words and convey cultural information are important aspects for translators to consider.