Analysis Of Pragmatic Equivalence In Dramatic Dialogue Translation From The Perspective Of Cooperative Principle

Most of the previous researches concerning drama translation are made from theperspective of literature. Few researches study drama translation from the perspective ofdrama itself. Drama is a special form in literature, which is mainly composed ofdialogues. The development of drama plot and display of personality are demonstratedby dialogues. So in studying drama translation, it is important for the researchers to dostudies on the translation of dialogues.In the traditional way, pragmatic theories are often applied to the analysis of real lifeconversations. And these theories are not so often applied to the analysis of literaryworks, not to mention drama. This thesis attempts to analyze dialogues in drama in thelight of pragmatic, that is, the author tries to analyze the pragmatic equivalence intranslating drama dialogue from the perspectives of Grice’s cooperative principle andconversational implicature. Grice holds that both parties in communication have tocooperate and conform to four maxims of cooperative principle, communicating with themost direct and the highest effective way. To express it in another way, sometimes peopledeliberately flout one of the maxims of cooperative principle, so it leads to the generationof conversational implicature. Applying this theory in drama translation would giveguidance for the translators. Translators can infer the implicature of dialogues andeffectively deliver it to achieve pragmatic equivalence. With a large number of examples,the author of the thesis has made detailed analysis of the inference of conversationimplicature in drama dialogues combined with Cooperative Principle. Through theanalysis, the implied meaning of the drama dialogues could be better understood. Alsothe author has made analysis of the pragmatic equivalence in the translation of dramadialogues. The pragmatic equivalence in the translation of drama dialogues also can beanalyzed from two aspects: pragmalinguistic equivalence and sociopragmaticequivalence. Through the analysis of pragmatic equivalence in the dialogues of Death of aSalesman combined with the Cooperative Principle, the author comes to a conclusionthat by making scripts having the same pragmatic equivalent in target language from thebasic nature can the translator succeed. In this way, there is practical meaning for thisthesis to study dialogues in the translation of Death of a Salesman from the perspectiveof pragmatics.