The Latest Developments Of Linguistic Approaches To The Translation Studies

In this dissertation the term "linguistic approaches to the translation studies" refers in particular to the predominant linguistics-oriented translation theories in the West since 1990s.As currently in the domestic academic circle there exist misunderstandings about linguistic approaches to the translation studies (TS), the dissertation accordingly makes a meta-theoretical study of the latest developments of the approaches with a detailed historical description and relevant critical analysis, based on which it also shows the author's views on the trend within the area of the TS discipline.The first chapter introduces the research subject with a review of the past research to the question under consideration. The final aim of the research, the methods being used and a brief study plan are also included.The second chapter involves a historical review of the linguistic approaches to the TS between 1950s-1990s. It defines the approaches and briefly introduces the Science School dominating in 1950s and 1960s that focused on the autonomy of translation. It argues that the approaches still developed after the TS had shifted the attention from the structurist linguistic-oriented studies to the more function- and culture-oriented studies.The third chapter introduces and evaluates the latest developments of the linguistic approaches since 1990 with a careful selection from kaleidoscope theories ever since. It mainly covers 1) text analysis of translation, including Juliane House's evaluation model, Mona Baker's model of pragmatic analysis and Theme-Rheme progression, Hatim and Mason's three-dimensional model of context analysis; 2) studies of translation as a language variation which mainly concern arisen corpus translation studies; 3) critical translation studies, including models based on critical discourse analysis and those based on social narratives, which explore how the target text has an impact upon the pragma-semiotic/ideological structures of the target (and the source) cultureThe fourth chapter mainly analyzes three impetuses to the linguistic approaches. It finds that the pragmatic turn and the discursive turn in linguistics during 1970s-1990s have drawn the scholars' attention to factors outside text. In addition, the focus shifting from the source text to the target text and then to factors of translators in TS field deepened scholars' understanding about translation issues, by which they incorporated in their descriptions formal linguistic analysis and analysis of the cultural setting of translation. The paper also points out, that the change of paradigms and an awareness of critical self-reflexiveness within the approaches also helped the researchers turn their eyes to multiple pointers of translation.The fifth chapter tries to find out theoretical roots of the linguistic approaches to TS from epistemological, ontological, methodological aspects. It focuses on a strong analytical philosophy tradition of the approaches and critically analyzes conceptual systems in this area, including key concepts such as "translation" , "equivalence" , "mediation" , "(re-)contextualization" and a few of other general concepts. The part also illustrates a methodological progress in this area with the change of methods from prescriptive, solely contrastive and micro analysis to the more descriptive, plural study with an integration of both micro and macro analysis. It also shows that literary translation has turned to be an important object for the research.The last chapter offers a short summary of the diachronic changes within the linguistic approaches to TS. It reevaluates the linguistic approaches and presents the author's views about the trend within the approaches and the whole TS discipline. It draws a conclusion that the latest developments of linguistic approaches have given much weight to the language analysis in TS, but this is conditioned on a combination of the language structure analysis with research interest beyond it. It believes that the approaches will continue to focus on the autonomy of translation, but scholars may emphasize more on a harmonious progress in investigations of both autonomy and heteronomy of translation. This also reflects a current tendency in TS of linking up language analysis and social-cultural concerns in investigation. Based on such a conclusion, the author believes that the discipline of TS may very well form an integrating and distinctive methodology of its own in the future.