A Pragmatic Study On Address Forms And Their Translation In Moment In Peking

Address forms, as an indispensable part in daily life, are deeply rooted in the nationaltraditional culture, and fully reflect the cultural heritage of different nations andpsychological characteristics of different speech communities. There is a huge gap betweenChinese address forms and English address forms because both of them are under differentcultural background. And a great number of Chinese address forms can hardly find theirequivalent accurate expressions in English appellation system. Mr. Lin Yutang, with histwo legs straddling the cultures of East and West, spares no effort to introduce Chineseculture to the western world through his English novels. As a result, Mr. Lin’s reproductionof dealing with address forms is worth studying. Taking Verschueren’s Dynamic ContextAdaptation as its theoretical foundation, this study aims to explore the characteristics aswell as translation methods and strategies of address forms in Moment in Peking, with afocus on a systematic analysis of Moment in Peking and its Chinese versions with itsEnglish-Chinese bilingual parallel corpus as the research approach. Statistic results andconcrete analysis of the translation strategies and methods in the original English novel andtwo Chinese versions show the characteristics of address forms translation. And thedynamic use and translation of address forms are also explored in this research.The findings of this research are the following:(1) Moment in Peking, as arepresentative works in Chinese-American English literature, though written in English, itis a novel about Chinese society and culture, the writing process of which is a creativeprocess of C-E translation, so Lin Yutang’s writing has the nature of translation;(2) By akind of hybrid translation, Lin Yutang creatively used English suffixes in reproducingChinese address forms so as to achieve the purpose of introducing the oriental culture to thewestern readers;(3) Through the contrastive analysis on the original works and the twotranslation versions, there are mainly seven translation methods in all. The major ones are literal translation, transliteration and free translation. Literal translation takes up the largestproportion in each version. As for free translation, the proportion is much less than that ofliteral translation. Moreover, mistranslation appears in both of Chinese versions;(4) LinYutang mainly adopts foreignization strategy in dealing with composing address forms inthe process of C-E translation. Translation versions by Zhang Zhenyu and Yu Fei are givenpriority to domestication whereas foreignization is complementary, because as a specialkind of cultural back translation, in order to help the target readers fully understand theoriginal works, both translators are unwilling to disturb the readers as much as possible.The research results show that both the use of address forms and their translation areprocesses of continuously making choices with the purpose of adapting to thecommunicative context and linguistic context. The translator achieves the dynamic contextadaptation by adopting different translation methods and strategies.