On The Translation Of The Socio-semiotic Meanings

Socio-semiotics has developed from semiotics. As a new discipline, it provides the comprehensive and feasible theoretical basis for translation practice and criticism.Socio-semiotics is a science to study the relationship between sign systems and society as well as human beings in social context. Signs have close relationship with certain social context and related contextual structure. Therefore, the interpretation of them should depned on the social situation in which they exist and other relevant signs.From the perspective of socio-semiotics, translation in essence is information transfer between two semiotic systems. The core of socio-semiotics approach to translation lies in its criterion "correspondence in meaning and similarity in function", which means translations should be equivalences in referential meaning, intralingual meaning and pragmatic meaning with similar functions, namely expressive, informative, aesthetic, phatic, vocative and metalingual functions.The classic literary work Ru Lin Wai Shi is characterized by its colorful cultural information and could provide abundant instances for translation study. The thesis conducts a contrastive analysis between Ru Lin Wai Shi and its translated version The Scholars in terms of three meanings, namely referential meaning, intralingual meaning and pragmatic meaning with the criterion "correspondence in meaning and similarity in function". Through analysis of realization of the three types of meanings in target language, the thesis intends to prove the theoretical value of socio-semiotics in rendering the similar works full of cultural information and provide some suggestions to translation practice as well as criticism.