Pragmatic Functions And English Translation Of Modal Particles In Mo Yan’s Novel Frog From The Perspective Of Speech Act Theory

The translation of Chinese modern literature works has received more and more attention through a series of activities of telling Chinese stories,spreading Chinese voices and interpreting Chinese unique features.Since Mo Yan won the Nobel Prize for Literature,there has been a wave of “Mo Yan fever” at home and abroad.His works have inspired foreign readers to learn and understand Chinese culture.Howard Goldblatt is the only English translator of Mo Yan’s novels.His translation has enhanced Mo Yan’s literary influence overseas and promoted the spread of Chinese literature overseas,and has also made a great contribution to Chinese culture going abroad.Most of Mo Yan’s novels are works of local literature,and the use of modal particles is omnipresent.Modal particles are a kind of function words unique to Chinese.Although they seem insignificant,they play a pivotal role in the context of daily conversations such as emphasis,turning,and pause.Speech act theory explores linguistics from a pragmatic point of view and studies the daily usage of language.Significant progress has been made in this field and it provides valuable thinking for translation studies.Therefore,this study takes the speech act theory as the theoretical basis,and mainly studies the pragmatic functions of “a(啊)”,“ba(吧)”,“ma(吗)” and “ne(呢)”,and analyzes the corresponding translation strategies on this basis.This article is a corpus-based research based on the original text of Frog and the English version translated by Howard Goldblatt.The corpus consists of five letters written by the playwright Tadpole to the Japanese writer Sugitani Akihito sensei,four full-length narratives and a nine-act play,including the original Chinese text(187,347 words)and the English translation(128,964 words),with a total of 316,311 words.The author extracts the source language and its target language containing “a”,“ba”,“ma” and “ne” from a self-built corpus,and analyzes its pragmatic function sentence by sentence in order to discover the reflection of their pragmatic functions and translation strategies.The results show that the four modal particles share some similar pragmatic functions and also have some unique pragmatic functions.There are ten main pragmatic functions,namely 1)calling for an answer(“a”,“ma” and “ne”);2)reinforcing(softening)the judgment tone(“a”,“ba”and “ne”);3)reinforcing the rhetorical tone(“ma” and “ne”);4)softening the tone of criticism(“a”and “ne”);5)drawing attention(“ma” and “ne”);6)representing pause and introducing the following part(“a”,“ba” and “ne”);7)reinforcing the refuting tone(“a” and “ne”);8)giving directives(“a” and “ba”);9)seeking common ground(“ba”);10)posing a challenge(“ma”).Most of these ten pragmatic functions can be reflected in the translation,but there are also some special cases,the disappearance or transformation of pragmatic functions.Based on these ten pragmatic functions,four relatively common translation strategies are summarized,namely 1)omitting modal particles;2)adding adverbs or adjectives;3)changing the sentence types;4)adding modal verbs or modal phrases.These strategies are sometimes used alone or in combination to achieve better results.Based on the corpus,this study discovers the main pragmatic functions of the four modal particles,and puts forward corresponding translation strategies on this basis,which has certain practical significance for translation teaching and practice.This study hopes that the translation strategies proposed in it can provide some practical help and suggestions for translation practice,and have enlightenment for translation teaching.