A Study On The Translation Of Implicit Meaning In Literary Works

Implicit meaning is the artistic pursuit and aesthetic standard for literary creation, providing nourishment for literary works and sophisticated tactics for communications through language. It realizes a fusion of the feelings with the natural setting through artistic language and contains elegant implication that is not explicit in the verbal form. In the intercourse through language, implicit meaning could embody tasteful humor, tactful innuendo and stylish overtones. The study of implicit meaning is the core of Chinese philosophy and represents the developmental trend in language philosophy and linguistics in the west, as is indicated from the research into the historical and present studies of the implicit meaning in the philosophical, literary and linguistic fields. This study is focused on the translation of implicated meaning in literary works, not only because implicit meaning embraces the purpose of communication and the intention of the author, but also because it embodies the purposeful pursuit and aesthetic standards of literary creation. In the translation circle, however, little efforts have been devoted to the study of it.With translation of implicit meaning inliterary works as its research object and highlighting implicature's generating and conveying process, the dissertation establishes, as the core of the research, the classification of implicit meaning in two categories including 4 types. The category of intentional implicit meaning includes the containing type and the entrusting type and the aesthetic category consists of the imagery type and the ideorealm type. The purpose is to explore the translation of implicit meaning in literary works, with major efforts made to construct a system for the understanding and transferring of the implicit meaning in literary works as well as its actual interpretation. Implicit meaning, as the term suggests, is implicated meaning of the language in use, i.e., the intentional meaning not explicitly expressed and the aesthetic implications in the literary works. The division of the four types of implicit meaning is accomplished on the basis of the analysis of implicit meaning by Qian Zhongshu and a further effort is made to categorize them in accordance with their characteristics. The two categories are situated in linguistic and literary research fields respectively and the two types in each category are both different and related: the containing type, also called the rhetorical type, is meaning within the words and the entrusting type, known as the situational type as well, is meaning beyond the words, their difference being the varying degrees of dependence on context. The imagery type is also called the symbolic type and correlated imagery types of implicit meaning form the ideorealm type. The converging of the two categories of implicit meaning is not brought about by purposeful analysis on the part of researchers, but a representative function of the very nature of language and literature. This understanding of implicit meaning constitutes a development in the field and a step out of the shadow of translation theories that identify translation either as a science or as an art.The dissertation is first of all devoted to a diachronic exploration of viewpoints on meaning in translation theories. The findings show that researches in the translation of meaning, either in or outside China, have all experienced developmental stages, from nothing to burgeoning, then to a relatively developed stage. The study of the translation of implicit meaning can be seen scattered sporadically in this developmental process, implicitly or explicitly, and a burgeoning trend of it can be discerned in recent years. Therefore, the study of implicit meaning in literary works has presented itself as a historic call. Furthermore, the developments in pragmatics and cognitive psychology have made it possible to study the overloaded message of language, that is, the implicit meaning and provided a theoretical foundation. At the same time, the progress in aesthetic psychology has also provided a psychoanalytical model for the aesthetic properties in literature. Specifically, the pragmatic theory about implied meaning, the relevance theory and pragmatic inference provide a theoretical foundation for the generation and translation of intentional implicit meaning while the schematic theory in aesthetic psychology and cognitive psychology provides the foundation for the generation and translation of aesthetic implicit meaning. The researches and developments in pragmatic presupposition and the schematic theory in cognitive psychology provide an interpretation for the construction and rebuild of the cognitive environment. Then the generative mechanism for implicit meaning is discussed in the dissertation. By integrating the various inference models in pragmatics, a new inference model of generative mechanism for intentional implicit meaning is put forward in the dissertation. In the inferring process, the containing type and the entrusting type of implicit meaning are only different in their reliance on context. At the same time, on the basis of the schema theory in cognitive psychology as well as aesthetic psychology, an aesthetic imagery schematic mechanism is put forward. This mechanism can serve as the generative mechanism for esthetic implicit meaning in translation and a basis and prototype for the rebuild of the aesthetic implicit meaning in translation, the original text and the translation being but different linguistic presentation of the aesthetic imagery schema.A major part of the dissertation is devoted to the study of the construction and rebuild of context, for implicit meaning is dependent on context and the inference of intentional implicit meaning in particular needs the cognitive context in the translation process, which makes the construction and rebuild of the cognitive context especially significant for the generation and translation of implicit meaning. In accordance with the theory about comprehension process in cognitive psychology, the idea is put forward in the dissertation that the cognitive context should be constituted by abstract sentences, cognitive schema and cognitive competence and purpose. A model for the construction of cognitive context is also put forward to include sentence stimulation—schema activation—knowledge selection—hypothesis formation. As for the rebuild of the context, the author of the dissertation, in light of the nature of pragmatic presupposition, proposes that the rebuild of context in translation is in the main to convey the pragmatic presupposition. In accordance with the need of implicit meaning, pragmatic presupposition may be divided into linguistic presupposition, functional presupposition and cultural presupposition, of which the one that exerts the greatest influence on and of the greatest importance to implicit meaning is cultural presupposition. Upon this understanding the translation of cultural presupposition is made a key point in the dissertation. Five methods to translate cultural presupposition are summed up and a survey is made of the influence of cultural presupposition on and its role in literary translation. To express the implicit meaning in literary works of translation, that is, in the actual translation practice, this dissertation, on the basis of cognitive context—inference mechanism and aesthetic imagery schema mechanism and drawing support from the univalent translation constitute model and bivalent translation constitute model advocated by Zhao Yanchun, puts forward the proposition of the three planes in the translation of implicit meaning:the semantic, the semantic-pragmatic and the pragmatic, and the principle of context-conditioned upward or downward shifting among the three planes mentioned above in the translation of intentional implicit meaning, providing grounds for literal and free translation. As for the translation of the aesthetic category of implicit meaning, the author of the dissertation, drawing on James S Holmes'two-map two-plane text-rank translation model and Jiang Qiuxia's image-G actualization translation model, proposes an aesthetic image schematic translation model, which, departing from actual transferring of meaning, identifies the aesthetic image schema as the medium of the transferring, the original and the translated texts being the presentation in different languages. This aesthetic image schema translation model makes good of Jiang's aesthetic image model which is too much on the macroscopic side and too generalized and therefore could offer better guidance to translation practice. Examples are furnished in the dissertation to illustrate the models and principles advocated in the dissertation and testify to their interpretative force in translation practice.In general, this research embodies an interdisciplinary interpretative quality and proves that translation studies is an interdisciplinary discipline and that literary translation is a combination of scientific and artistic translation approaches.