A Pragmatic Probe Into Translation Of Figures Of Speech

Incentives to the dissertationCulture-loaded words and expressions have always been "a hard nut to crack" in translation between English and Chinese, not only due to the linguistic differences between the two language systems concerned, but also because of the cultures that prevail behind each language. To successfully render culture-loaded words and expressions in the source language (SL) into the target language (TL) is of great importance to translation of any piece of text, especially to that of literary texts. We hope to be able to give some suggestions to the solution of such a problem, so we try to find a proper theory that might help understand and explain translational phenomena in this line.We find that the translation theories so far can quite safely be divided into two groups: the Linguistic School of Translation Theories vs the Literary School of Translation Theories. It can be said that ever since there was translation, there began the controversy between literal translation and free translation. This controversy led to the division into the two schools of translation studies and the long-standing "To be or not to be" dispute between them. In fact, both schools have their own insightfulness, and the controversy between them is nothing but an absolutization of the matter. We thus cannot help asking ourselves: why not find a juste-milieu (golden mean) and form a combination of these two schools, since perhaps the juste-milieu road, as always, is the true state of many affairs, including translational problems?We decide to take the theories of the linguistic school as the basis of our juste-milieu framework, owing to their integrality and preciseness; but we also hope to amalgamate elements from the literary school so as to help explain variability and irregularity. This comparatively well-balanced framework, we hope, can "speak by facts" and can observe a certain translational problem from different levels and angles, thus avoid many meaningless debates over "which one is better".However, it is no easy task to find such a proper theoretical framework. Many theories (mainly those of the linguistic school) are too abstract and general to solve and explain real...