On Translation Of Speech Presentation From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Based on the translation practice of the American writer Adam Silvera’s science fiction They Both Die at the End(Part one),this report explores the application of Relevance Theory to the translation of speech presentation of characters in literature.The novel belongs to the young adult literature,which tells stories of other young adults from the perspective of a young adult in the first person.The language is vivid and fresh,rich in colloquial expressions.The translator mainly discusses the main characters’ speech presentation in terms of interjections,non-standard languages,and rhetorical questions.From the perspective of a theoretic approach to translation,the report explores how Relevance Theory guides the translation of characters’ speech presentation in literary works.Relevance Theory,first proposed by French linguists Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson in 1986 in their co-authored work Relevance: Communication and Cognition,studies human communication from the perspective of cognitive psychology.Later,Ernst August Gutt,a British linguist,intends to explain translation under the framework of Relevance Theory.Thus,a relevance-theoretic approach to translation is developed in Gutt’s book Translation and Relevance: Cognition and Context,published in 1991.This approach sees translation as two ostensive-inferential communications,clarifies the responsibility borne by the translator as a recipient and a communicator,and points out that the translation should be an interpretive resemblance to the source text.Translator’s interpretation of the source text is highlighted according to Relevance Theory while reading the original text.When the pragmatic meaning of the source text bears greater significance than its lexical meaning,the translator must make dynamic inferences on the source text.This report focuses on certain expression patterns characteristic of colloquial language used by characters in the translated text,mainly including interjections,non-standard English and rhetorical questions.The translator is required to interpret these expressions based on his or her cognitive context.Therefore,while translating,the translator adopts relevance theory as a guiding theory to infer the original writer’s ostensive clues to accurately interpret the intended intentions and convey them to the target readers.