A Study on the English Translation of Culture-Loaded Words From the Perspective of Relevance-Theoretic Translation Theory—A Case Study of Yang Xianyi’s The True Story of Ah Q

Abstract

Culture-loaded words reveal the basic features of a country’s social life, customs and habits, religious beliefs, and so on. The meanings of culture-loaded words contain the profound cultural connotation of a country or a nation. However, due to the influence of different cultures, the original author and the target readers lack a common cognitive context, which means they cannot successfully conduct a cultural communication. Therefore, correctly understanding and translating these culture-loaded words have become a major problem for translators in the translation process of literary works. Under the guidance of the dual ostensive-inferential model in relevance-theoretical translation theory, this paper, by emphasizing the importance of common cognitive context to a successful translation, analyzes the translation process of five categories of culture-loaded words and summarizes the translation strategies that can accurately convey the writing intention of the original author, which provides a new perspective for the translation of culture-loaded words.