Conversational Implicature-Based Analysis And Translation Of Fictional Conversation

Conversation is an important component of fiction. Fictional conversation has idiosyncratic, communicative, socio-cultural and aesthetic characteristics and it plays an important role in revealing characters' personality and reflecting social phenomena. Conversation in fiction can be regarded as the most interesting and memorable part in fiction.However, little study has been found done on it. So far, very few monographs at home and abroad have specifically discussed the translation of fictional conversation. Only a few chapters can be found touching on the issue, such as Chapter Eight in Literary Stylistics and Fictional Translation (Shen Dan, 1995), Chapter Six in Pragmatic in Chinese Culture: Speechology in Humanistic Networks (钱冠连, 1997). In the kernel foreign language journals published in the past decade, only a few articles are found to take the translation of fictional conversation as a research focus. In these limited materials available, it is noticed that these studies are confined within the framework of theories, such as literary stylistics, ethnolinguistics, sociolinguistics, aesthetics, etc., and very few of them focus on the translation of implicated meaning or intended meaning in conversation. The conversational implicature theory is one of the single most important theories in pragmatics. It has strong interpreting power in translating. Since meanings are closely related with culture and determined by the writer's/speaker's intention in a given context, it is quite difficult for translators to bring out absolutely both the intended meaning in the context and cultural, linguistic aspects of the original message. And this problem can be solved from the perspective of conversational implicature theory, as the significance of this theory lies in its strong interpreting power to guide translators to discover the implicated meaning or intended meaning.This thesis first introduces two important concepts in pragmatics, i.e. meaning and context, and then introduces conversational implicature theory and the application of CP to the analysis of fictional conversation. Chapter 2 analyses generation of conversational implicature and choose some typical examples from Vanity Fair to explain how to understand characters' conversations and their implicature. On the basis of conversational implicature theory, chapter 3 expounds how to realize pragmatic equivalence in fictional conversation translation, and then explores translation principles, strategies and concrete translation methods by comparing three Chinese versions of Vanity Fair (宋建超,1998;杨必, 1990;高玉其, 2003). Finally, it is concluded that the theory of conversational implicature plays a unique role in guiding translators to accurately understand the implicated conversational meaning.The basic aim of the present thesis is to argue, mainly by way of practical analysis, for the explanatory validity of the conversational implicature approach to the study of translation of fictional conversation. This study shows its significance in two aspects. It not only sheds light on translation of fictional conversation, especially on conveying the intended meaning or implicated meaning in the translated version, but also it verifies the strong validity of pragmatic theory in literature criticism and literature translation.