Is Pragmatics About Mind Reading? English-Chinese Translation Practice Report

The linguistic paper Is Pragmatics about Mind Reading? for the translation practice report is one from the second part of the book Semantics and Pragmatics: Drawing a Line.The author offers a critical assessment of the debate between pragmatic theory and psychological plausibility,and believes that the role of ‘mind reading’ in pragmatic theory should be treated with caution.Nouns,adjectives and prepositions with the meaning of action are often used in the text to express the information originally conveyed by verbs,and the nouns converted or derived from verbs act as objects,causing the delexical use of verbs,which are static expressions commonly used in academic texts.Guided by Nida’s Functional Equivalence Theory,the translator contrasts the features of Chinese and English and summarizes two translation techniques,that is,the shift of parts of speech and sentence elements.The nouns,adjectives and prepositions that retain the meaning of verbs can be translated into verbs,and the subjects,objects and predicatives in sentences can also be translated into predicates.At the same time,I have studied how to put empty verbs into Chinese.Abstract nouns expressing action can be translated into verbs and empty verbs should be omitted according to the context.The translation practice report aims to provide some references for linguistic text translation later.