本研究主要援引關聯理論,探討英國作家尼克‧宏比(Nick Hornby)的作品About a boy《非關男孩》譯本中,英國文化詞彙以及一般文化詞彙翻譯因未達最佳關聯,導致關聯性弱化而所出現的「語意不清」、「語意真空」以及「語意偏離」等三種閱讀理解障礙。筆者將從認知語境中宏觀以及微觀的角度出發,並透過語境效果、理解努力以及關聯性等觀點深入分析上述理解障礙發生可能之原因。最後,再輔以柯平(1994)所提之「釋義」、「增益」、「歸化」、「加注」、「具體化」、「概略化」以及「約定俗成」等策略與原則,試圖提出解決因應之道,研究如何為讀者構建最佳關聯,並幫助譯語讀者取得趨近或等同於原語讀者的語境效果。
This thesis applies Relevance Theory to probe into three kinds of comprehension obstacles of cultural terms — British English cultural terms and common English cultural terms in the Chinese version of Nick Hornby’s About a boy. In this study, those obstacles, caused by term translation failing to achieve optimal relevance, are categorized as “ambiguity of meaning”, “vacuum of meaning”, and “mistranslation” , based on three different levels of damage they cause to target language readers. From macro- and micro-perspective of cognitive context, this study analyzes the contextual effect, the processing effort, and the relevance of the obstacles to explore the possible reasons why the translation of the cultural terms fail to help the readers to reach optimal relevance. This research also tries to find out a solution to achieve optimal relevance through the translation strategies and techniques proposed by Ke Ping (1994) — paraphrase, contextual amplification, adaptation, annotation, specification, generalization, and idiomization, in an effort to provide readers the same or almost the same contextual effects as the ones that the source text offers.