（英语语言文学专业论文）从关联理论看文化缺省的翻译.pdf

iv 从关联理论看文化缺省的翻译 研究生：黄 华 年级：2 0 0 5 级 学科专业：英语语言文学 指导老师：唐高元 研究方向：翻译理论与实践 中文摘要 起源于认知科学的关联理论对翻译有一定的解释力。格特应用这一理论对翻译进行研 究，提出了关联翻译理论，在翻译界产生了一定的影响。本文试图从关联理论的视角对文 化缺省的翻译进行研究。 从关联理论的角度看，翻译是借助语言在两种文化之间进行的交际活动。这个过程必 然涉及原文作者、译者和译语读者三方的认知活动。文化缺省是指作品中作者与其意向读 者所共享的文化背景知识的缺省。它是认知交际过程的自然结果。在写作时，作者通常留 下一些语义空白，一方面可以节约笔墨，达到简洁的目的，另一方面，也给读者提供一个 在探索中享受文学意境的空间，从而让读者积极地参与到作品中去。读者通过激发自己的 文化背景知识来填充缺省留下的空位，获得语意连贯，进而欣赏到作品的美学价值。但是 由于文化缺省是一种特殊的语言现象，而原文作者和译语读者的认知环境又不同，文化缺 省很可能导致误读或者理解障碍。 因此，文化缺省的翻译对于译者而言是一个巨大的挑战。 本文对文化缺省现象进行了系统的分析和研究。通过研究文化缺省所导致的各种翻译 问题，总结出了几种常见的错误与不足之处。根据认知语用学的关联理论，提出了文化缺 省翻译的理论模型，进而通过具体的译例，分析了翻译文化缺省的几种常用方法，明确指 出了文化缺省的翻译是一个动态的过程。 除“ 引言” 和“ 结语” 外，全文共分为五个部分。 引言部分回顾了自关联理论提出以来，国内外对这一理论的研究现状，尤其是将其应 用到翻译领域的研究，进而指出本文研究的目的。 第二章讨论关联理论与翻译。通过介绍关联概念的历史演进过程，关联理论的几个基 本思想，进而探讨关联理论与翻译的关系，肯定了翻译交际的推理性，指出翻译是一个寻 求原语与目的语语境的最佳关联的跨语言的解释过程。 第三章对文化缺省进行了系统性的讨论。从定义、生成机制到分类，进而从语篇连贯、 语用功能、美学价值和修辞价值四个方面对文化缺省的功能进行探讨。 第四章提出了由文化缺省引发的翻译问题。以译者在翻译中承担的角色作为切入点， 列举了文化缺省翻译中三种常见的问题，即：误译、欠额翻译和过度翻译。 第五章论述了关联理论对文化缺省翻译的解释力。提出将关联理论框架下的推理模式 应用到文化缺省翻译中去，并讨论了译者在翻译文化缺省问题时应该考虑的几个原则。 第六章根据上面提到的模式，对文化缺省的翻译方法进行了分类，并用译例加以说明。 v 在此基础上指出将文化缺省翻译看作一个动态的过程。 文章最后指出，文化缺省涉及交际中的认知问题，因此以认知和交际为中心的关联理 论对文化缺省的翻译具有一定的解释力。 关键词：文化缺省；关联理论；翻译 vi a relevance- theoretic approach to the translation of cultural default postgraduate: h u a n g h u a grade:2005 major field of study: english language relevance theory; translation 论文独创性声明 本人郑重声明：所提交的学位论文是本人在导师的指导下进行的研究工作及取得的成果。除文中已 经注明引用的内容外，本论文不含其他个人或其他机构已经发表或撰写过的研究成果。对本文的研 究作出重要贡献的个人和集体，均已在文中以明确方式标明。本人承担本声明的法律责任。 研究生签名： 日期： 论文使用授权声明 本人完全了解广西师范大学有关保留、使用学位论文的规定。广西师范大学、中国科学技术信息研 究所、清华大学论文合作部，有权保留本人所送交学位论文的复印件和电子文档，可以采用影印、 缩印或其他复制手段保存论文。本人电子文档的内容和纸质论文的内容相一致。除在保密期内的保 密论文外，允许论文被查阅和借阅，可以公布（包括刊登）论文的全部或部分内容。论文的公布（包 括刊登）授权广西师范大学学位办办理。 研究生签名： 日期： 导 师签名： 日期： iii acknowledgements in doing research work and writing of this thesis, i owe debts to many people. without their help and support, this thesis would never have been completed. first and foremost, i would especially like to acknowledge a deep sense of gratitude to my supervisor, professor t a n g g a o y u a n , for his valuable suggestions as well as his kindness and patience, which i would cherish deeply in my heart. but for his earnest instructions and valuable suggestions, this thesis could not have appeared in its present form. i would also like to thank professor bai jingze, professor zhang xianglin, professor yuan binye and all the other teachers in the school of foreign studies who have taught me and given me great help during my three years of study in guangxi normal university. meanwhile, i would like to extend my thanks to professor ma xia and professor pan zhengqin，both from guilin university of electronic technology. their valuable suggestions have instructed me a lot during my draft writing period. finally, i sincerely owe my gratitude to my parents, who support me in all directions with their treasurable love, which will furthermore encourage me to conquer all difficulties both in my life and study. thank all my classmates and friends for their support and encouragement they have offered me all these years. 1 chapter 1 introduction since the existence of translation activities, so many scholars from both home and abroad have put their efforts to establish a comprehensive theoretical system for translation. however, the result is far from being perfect. therefore, there is some need for change. and in fact, translation studies have experienced a significant shift during the past twenty years. translation theorists have been absorbing more and more new fruits from other branches of knowledge, including psychology, philosophy, linguistics and pragmatics in particular. relevance theory, which is viewed by jucker as “ the most significant monograph of pragmatics during the past ten years” (jucker, 1997), has provided a new cognitive perspective for the study of translation. 1.1 related literature at home and abroad in 1986, dan sperber and deirdre wilson published relevance: communication and cognition. in the book, they established a new cognition theory named relevance theory. this symbolized the coming of a new era for pragmatics. the book was revised and republished in 1995. since its publication, the book has been translated into french, italian, spanish, russian, japanese, korean, malay and many other languages, and relevance theory has stimulated the interest of linguistic scholars throughout the world. reviews, comments and research papers have boomed in some renowned linguistic journals such as pragmatics, journal of pragmatics, lingua, pragmatics vol.90, 1993) to present the latest research achievements on relevance theory. in spain, yus, a scholar from universidad de alicante, collected a relevance theory online bibliographic service, people can learn the latest research achievements through the website http:/www.ua.es/dfing/rt.htm. in 1995, university college london founded a relevance research group and launched a column called relevance e- mail list on the internet. both made relevance theory more accessible to people all over the world. having been influenced by international current, chinese scholars gradually focused their study on the interpretation of the utterance. professor shen jiaxuan (1988) first introduced 2 relevance theory to china in an article titled a review of relevance: communication and cognition. other papers related to relevance include: a review of relevance theory (zhang yafei, 1992), pragmatic inference in relevance theory (sun yu, 1993), on relevance theory (qu weiguo, 1993), a review of relevance theory the essential of cognitive pragmatics (he ziran or else showing something should be considered a form of inferential communication, on a par with meaning something by a certain behavior; and inferential communication and ostension should be equated (ibid. 54). in relevance theory, communication is viewed as an ostensive- inferential process. from the 7 perspective of the speaker, communication is an ostensive process during which the informative intension is pointed whereas from the perspective of the hearer, communication is an inferential process. ostention is the behavior that makes manifest an intention to make something manifest (ibid. 49). inference refers to the process in which the hearer makes an interpretation of the speaker s communicative intention. 2.2.2 context and optimal relevance in relevance theory, the notion of context is a psychological construct, a subset of the hearer s assumptions about the world (ibid. 15). an important characteristic of context in relevance theory is that it is assumed to be organized, and that this organization affects the accessibility of a particular piece of contextual information on a particular occasion. according to sperber and wilson (2001), the central factor that makes communication succeed is the pursuit of optimal relevance on the part of both the communicator and the receptor. an utterance is optimally relevant (a) when it enables the audience to find without unnecessary effort the meaning intended by the communicator and (b) when that intended meaning is worth the audience s effort, that is, when it provides adequate benefits to the audience. the function of optimal relevance on communication is captured in the principle of relevance. according to this principle, whenever a person sets out to communicate something, he automatically communicates the presumption that what he is going to say is believed to be optimally relevant to the audience. on these assumptions, the receptor will proceed with the interpretation process until he arrives at an interpretation that fulfills both conditions: it is derivable without unnecessary effort and yields adequate contextual effects. thus, the search for optimal relevance guides the hearer not only to the speaker- intended context but also to the speaker- intended information. 2.2.3 principle of relevance seen from what is mentioned above, the presumption of optimal relevance can be summarized as follows: presumption of optimal relevance (a) the set of assumptions i which the communicator intends to make manifest to the addressee is relevant enough to make it worth the addressee s while to process the ostensive stimulus. (b) the ostensive stimulus is the most relevant one communicator could have used to communicate i (sperber it continues when the translator makes inference about the source language writer s intention which follows logically, or at least warranted by, these contextual assumptions of the original; and it ends with the version which the translator considers to be the optimal one for the target language audience. the translator is viewed as the first receptor and the second communicator. therefore, he is obligatory to produce a text from which the target language reader can infer what the source language communicator s intention is. the practice of a translator is providing enough ostensive and relevant stimuli for the target reader, at the same time he infers the original meaning from stimulus he obtains from the source text by right choice of contextual assumption. 2.3.2 translation as a process of searching for optimal relevance when there is any doubt whether the translator s notion of translation is sufficiently similar 9 to that held by his audience - the target language reader, the translator would do well to state the source language writer s intention clearly at an appropriate place how he has understood his task as a translator. therefore, the ultimate goal for the translation, as is assumed by gutt (1991), is its optimal relevance to the source text as well as the target cultural context on which the contextual assumptions are built. this rule of optimal relevance, as zhao yanchun states, is believed to be able to match, to the greatest possible extent, the source text communicator s intention with the target text audience s expectation. to be consistent with the presumption of optimal relevance, the translator must guarantee the success of communication of translation between the source language writer and the target language receptor. hence, to ensure the success of translation communication, it is legitimate for the translator to utilize every means of translation strategies including direct translation, indirect translation, and even adaptation in translation practice to establish optimal relevance between the source language writer and the target language receptor. 2.3.3 translation as interpretive use from the perspective of relevance theory, translation falls naturally under the interpretive use of language: the translation is intended to restate in one language what someone else has said or written in another language (gutt, 1998:46). the principle of relevance heavily constrains the translation with regard to both what it is intended to convey and how it is expressed. thus if one asks in what respects the intended interpretation of the translation should resemble the original, the answer is: in respects that make it adequately relevant to the audience, that is, that offer adequate contextual effects; if one asks how the translation should be expressed, the answer is: it should be expressed in such a manner that it yields the intended interpretation without putting the audience to unnecessary processing effort. hence considerations of relevance constrain both the intended interpretation of the translation and the way it is expressed. these conditions seem to provide exactly the guidance that translators and translation theorists have been looking for: they determine in what respects the translation should resemble the original, only in those respects that can be expected to make it adequately relevant to the target language audience. they determine also that the translation should be clear and natural in expression in the sense that it should produce adequate contextual effects, that is, the translation should not be unnecessarily difficult to be understood. 10 chapter 3 cultural default cultural default is a very common phenomenon in communication. once a vague and unfamiliar term, it has been gradually becoming familiar to most scholars. since more and more attention is paid to cultural factors in translation, even the ordinary readers know something about it. in this chapter, we will make a systematic analysis of cultural default. our analysis includes its definition, classification, functions and some other aspects. they will provide us with a firm basis to make a further study of the problems caused by cultural default in translation. 3.1 definition of cultural default according to professor wang dongfeng, cultural default is “ the absence of relevant cultural background knowledge shared by the author and his intended reader” (wang dongfeng, 1997). to further our understanding of cultural default, it is necessary for us to begin with an analysis of “ default” . whenever a writer composes a particular text, he assumes that there must be some information his reader has already known and accordingly he treats the information as default elements. the default elements are regarded as the background knowledge of our conversation or communication, which need not to be spoken out or written down as the reader or the hearer knows it previously. just under such a condition, the word, or sentence, with multiple options of meaning, will be treated with a particular meaning so as to convey intentions of the speaker or the writer. for example, if the writer wants to describe a restaurant scene, he does not have to inform his reader or hearer that there are tables, waiters and menus in the restaurant. the writer or speaker treats all these conventional aspects of a situation as “ default elements” . such default elements need not to be mentioned in the text or conversation as the participants all share the common knowledge. the fact that the knowledge shared by the writer and the reader is not verbalized in the text is called situational default; if default elements are related to the information already provided in the text, it is called contextual default, whereas if it has something to do with the cultural background knowledge outside the text, it is called cultural default. here, culture is not understood in the narrow sense as man s advanced intellectual inventions or creations, but in the broader anthropological sense, culture refers to “ knowledge, namely, the shared and learned patterns of information a group uses in order to generate meaning among its members” (wuzzel, 1988:2). culture encompasses “ subjective dimensions (beliefs, attitudes, values), interactive dimensions (verbal and nonverbal language), and material dimension (artifacts)” (ibid.). emerging in the original text, the default elements can be readily understood by the 11 intended reader. however, in translation practice, more often than not, these elements interrupt the target reader s coherence of understanding and leave semantic vacancies which often hamper the readers from smoothly comprehending the original meaning. therefore, to get a successful communication, it is required that the vacancies left by the default elements be filled or compensated. for the contextual default, the reader can refer to the text and find out the necessary information to help him understand the meaning of the text. so this kind of default can be solved completely by analyzing the text and finding out the information which is defaulted. but as far as these default elements are related to culture, it is impossible to find out the information which is necessary to compensate the semantic vacancies, because the background knowledge assumed by the writer to be shared with the intended reader is outside the text. in the circumstances, only by stimulating the background knowledge stored in memory can a coherent understanding be realized. however, the target reader of the translation version is unable to achieve understanding of the text with cultural default, because they are from completely different cultural backgrounds and ignorant of the corresponding cultural knowledge intended by the original writer. take the following example to illustrate this point. (2) (凤姐与黛玉开玩笑说) “ 你既喝了我们家的茶, 怎么还不给我们家做媳妇” ? （曹雪 芹， 红楼梦 ） version: “ drinking our family tea, a daughter- in- law to be!” (translated by yang xianyi therefore, the specific information of them is processed as default. for example: (5) i am not hamlet. in this short sentence, “ hamlet” serves as a trigger that can remind the english readers immediately of the story of hamlet, the hero in the greatest british dramatist william shakespeare s play hamlet. being indecisive in taking revenge on his uncle, hamlet finally died. later on, “ hamlet” is labeled as the representative people of hesitant or slow in taking actions. in the following chinese poem, the default information is also related to a literary text preceding it. (6) 雾失楼台，月迷津渡， 桃源望断无寻处。(秦观踏莎行) 桃源 is a place described by tao qian, the famous poet in jin dynasty. in his noted prose the peach blossom land(桃花源记), people live a simple and happy life. qin guan mentioned the place in his poem to express his longing for an ideal land of happiness. as chinese readers are very familiar with the place because of tao qian s prose, the detailed information is treated as default in qin guan s poem. 14 3.3.3 historical events every nation has a specific history of its own. every history is abound with events which happened in the past concerning the social, political and economic activities of a nation. those historical events were