Pragmatic Implicature And Literary Translation

It is the consensus of the translation circles that translating is translating meaning; however, opinions differ from each other as to the connotation of meaning and the realization of meaning in the target language. Due to the lack of theoretical sustainment, scientific classification of specific examples, many translation problems involving pragmatic implicature remain unsolved. This thesis purports to offer a fair, objective and systematic approach to the translation of pragmatic implicatures in literary texts.Chapter One provides a detailed introduction to the development of translation studies and pragmatic studies, indicating that the application of pragmatics to translation will shed new light on translation studies.Chapter Two is a tentative study on application of Grice's theory of conversational implicature to literary translation in the light of Bakhtin's theory.In Chapter Three, based on the premise that in all translating processes, there are two moments: the moment of comprehension and the moment of expression, the author points out that it is the aesthetic power of literary texts that decides the existence of many sentences with pragmatic implicature. The translator, therefore, must take the reader's response into full account. Through an analysis of three tendencies of translating pragmatic implicatures, the author draws attention to the importance of retaining literary implicatures in the target language.From Chapter Four to Chapter Six, the author introduces three parameters of translating implicatures through examples: context, nonverbal symbols and inference.Finally, as the conclusion for the whole dissertation, the author restates that the implicature theory cannot, on its own, serve as a theory of literary translation, but the application of pragmatics explores a new and promising vista for translation studies.