Pre-emptive Usage Of Deixis And Translation

This thesis is an attempt to analyze the similarities and diversities of pre-emptive usage and anti-pre-emptiveness of deixis between English and Chinese, and to point out their role in CE/EC translation. Based on the comparative analysis of person deixis, time deixis, place deixis, discourse deixis, and social deixis in both English and Chinese respectively, the author has come to the following conclusions: First, generally speaking, similarities between the two languages are greater than diversities, except for social deixis with more differences between the SL and TL. Second, there are richer deictic expressions in Chinese than those in English, which has an effect on word selection in translation. Third, anti-pre-emptiveness of deixis results from such factors as lack of deictic information, psychological activities of participants in speech event and so on. Therefore, the author suggests that pre-emptive usage and anti-pre-emptiveness of deixis in both languages should be attached importance to in translation. For those deictic expressions which are similarly used, equivalence can be achieved through literal translation, while for those which differ in usage, relative shift is adopted based on the nature of deictic usage in TL, so that pragmatic equivalence can be achieved in the translated text, otherwise, the translation would be stiff, or what's worse, there would be pragmatic failure. What is worth noting is that pragmatic equivalence can not be achieved in the translation of some social deictic expressions, some information is lost in the process of translation, and thus how to avoid such loss to the greatest extent deserves further study.