Translating Fictional Dialogues From The Perspective Of The Theory Of Conversational Implicature

Dialogue is a significant part of fiction and plays a vital role in portraying characters by revealing their inner mind and personality.Due to the need to depict the images of characters and promote the development of plots,some fictional dialogues may carry special pragmatic meanings and run counter to the basic cooperative rule of daily conversations.These fictional dialogues seem to have violated the Cooperative Principle of daily conversation,but they are actually created by the writer to convey particular implicatures.In the process of translating a fiction,if the translator could fully understand the pragmatic meanings conveyed by the dialogues and restore them in the target text,the target text reader will have a better understanding of the writer's intention,the characters' images and the theme of the fiction.This study is a commentary on translating the English short story Conduction into Chinese,the dialogues in particular.There exist many dialogues in the novel Conduction,some of which seemingly violate the Cooperative Principle of daily conversation but convey particular implicatures.In the process of translating the short story,the author of this study pays special attention to the dialogues' pragmatic features,analyzes their conversational implicatures and explores the methods for translating them.In the commentary part,this study,from the perspective of the Theory of Conversational Implicature,selects typical examples of the dialogues that convey particular implicatures and classifies them into four groups according to the four maxims of the theory.Then the pragmatic features and translating methods of each group are discussed in detail.Finally,the author summarizes four strategies aiming at restoring in the target text the pragmatic features of the dialogues in the source text.Firstly,for translating the dialogues that violate the quantity maxim,the translator should focus on the fine details of them and translate the implicatures on the same scale;Secondly,for translating the dialogues that violate the quality maxim,the translator should restore the rhetoric and preserve the style;Thirdly,for translating the dialogues that violate the relation maxim,the translator should analyze the context and pay attention to the logic;Fourthly,for translating the dialogues that violate the manner maxim,the translator should render them in a proper register and imitate their original syntactic structures.By proposing these translation strategies,the author of the present paper intends to retain the pragmatic features of the dialogues in the source text and better depict the images of characters and promote the development of plots in the target text.The overall quality of the translation can thus be improved.