A Report On Translating Rhetorical Questions In Thunderstorm From The Perspective Of The Pragmatic Functions

As the cultural exchanges between China and the world are getting increasinglycloser, Chinese literature has been recognized by the world, including poetry, fictionand prose. Chinese contemporary drama is an indispensable part of Chinese literature,but the translation of it is not as developed as other literary works, no matter in number,spreading speed and spreading range. After collecting data, I found that a large amountof researches have been made regarding translation of drama, while only a fewresearchers have studied translation of rhetorical questions in drama. As a commonsentence structure in drama, rhetorical question adds a lot to the atmosphere and helpsto depict the roles, so the research on translation of rhetorical questions in drama is ofgreat significance in spreading Chinese drama into the West.Rhetorical questions reveal the speaker’s mood, status and his/her relation withthe listener as well as what he/she really wants to express. That is to say, rhetoricalquestions work for certain pragmatic functions, so analysis of pragmatic functionsshould be the most important step in understanding and translating rhetorical questions.In this report, I translated part of Thunderstorm, concerning much about the underlyingpragmatic functions and effects, attempting to conclude some strategies in translationof rhetorical questions in drama.Four major problems are put forward in this report:1) whether to translate out theimplicatures,2) how to translate rhetorical markers and auxiliary words,3) how toexpress the rhetorical mood of questions without rhetorical markers or auxiliary words,4) how to deal with echo. And finally some applicable solutions have been worked out,for example, omission, literal translation and transformation can be adopted intranslating rhetorical markers. At the same time some advice has been given to thetranslation version of Wang Zuoliang and Barne’s.