The Pragmatic View Of Translation

Pragmatics is the study of language usage and its rules. In 1938, pragmatics was first introduced by Charles Morris as a branch of semiotics, and it has been widely regarded as an extremely important branch of linguistics. In recent years, great achievements have been made in this field. Pragmatics has been correlated with language, society, culture and communication, and it has become a joint science of cognition and society of cross-linguistic and cross-cultural communication.Translation involves the transfer of meaning between two languages. Consequently, it also concerns the above-mentioned factors covering language, society, culture and communication. The core of translation is meaning. According to Nida, translation is communication, and Newmark holds that communication is the function of translation. Actually, such a communication is the interplay or a two-way psychological process between the author and the translator. According to pragmatics, such a communication is the encoding and decoding process between the author and the translator, and the decoding process of the translator actually is the process of translating.The basic issues of pragmatics include: Grice's Cooperative Principle, Austin's Speech Act(s) theory, Searl's Indirect Speech Act theory, Leech's Politeness Principle, Relevance Theory and the inference of implicature and Context (context of culture and context of situation),and the core is implicature and context.This paper mainly deals with the application of pragmatic principles to translation, and it emphasizes the significance of context in correct understanding the implicature of the original. In brief, the pragmatic translation is a new field and a new approach to translation study.