Pragmatic Analyses Of The Implications In The Descriptions Of Characters In A Dream Of Red Mansions And Its Translations

The study on the translation of A Dream of Red Mansions has a rather long history, but is still far from adequate especially for the criticism on the translated versions. Only few researches adopted pragmatic theories to provide persuasive analyses on the translation of the implications that are heavily dependent on situational context and co-text in the novel. By sampling typical examples of the descriptions about the characters, the thesis intends to analyze the pragmatic implications and prove that the equivalence of pragmatic implications is an important aspect of the equivalence people expect in translation especially in literary translation. In each case of study the author applies the results of the analyses to evaluate the quality of some existing translated versions. The focuses of the quality assessments are put on (1) the extent to which the pragmatic significance of the implications is realized and (2) the degree of implicitness of the implications conveyed in translation. The present thesis, with thorough analyses from various angles of pragmatics such as context, presupposition, conversational implicature and speech act, repeatedly discusses and proves that these two aspects complete each other and compose a "standard" to be observed in translation. The finding of the analyses is that both the significance and the degrees of implicitness of various implications have to be preserved in translation of the fiction to achieve satisfactory equivalence. This thesis also points out, on base of the preceding pragmatic analyses, some factors that contribute a lot to the realization of the equivalence of pragmatic implication, and in conclusion offers some advices for achieving equivalence of pragmatic implications according to those specific factors.