Pragmatic Aspects In Translating Practical Writings

Since the early 1950s, there has been an upsurge in serious studies of translation, both in its theoretical, historical, didactic and professional dimensions and in its practice at the point when translators do something in response to their own reading of a text and which leads to the production of a second text. Whatever translation is in its entirety, it seems to involve semiotic, linguistic, textual, social, psychological aspects or elements, all of which are being studied nowadays as determining factors in whatever the translator does.Pragmatics, one aspect of linguistics, is a science to describe language dynamically. That is to say, pragmatics stresses on language in use and its meaning in context, and on how the speaker (writer) expresses and how the listener (reader) understands.Specifically, pragmatic approaches attempt to explain translation -procedure, process and product - from the point of view of what is done by the original author in or by the text, what is done in the translation as a response to the original, how and why it is done in the way in that context.When it comes to translating practical writings (PW), the translator has to deal with it specially, for PW are characterized by briefness, accuracy, purposefulness etc.This thesis is intended to analyze translation of practical writings (PW) by adopting some pragmatic theories, and some useful and valuable translation strategies are suggested herein.Chapter 1 mainly illustrates the notion of pragmatic translation. Pragmatics studies the use of language and the user of language. It intends to explain what purpose people want to attain through exchange and how. Thus, the research on pragmatics is apparently related to the translator's understanding and expressing in translation activity.The understanding of language in use is not static. It is influenced by meaning, context and cultural background, which determine that the translator should notice the dynamic implicalure of the living language.Pragmatic translation, dealing with the language in use (esp. PW), has a lot in common with dynamic equivalent translation advocated by Nida. Specifically speaking, the closest and most natural target language is applied to convey the content of the original when the form of the original can hardly be maintained.Deixis straddles the semantic/pragmatic border. The pragmatic translation of deixis rests on understanding the deictic information in SL. In chapter 2, the four types of deixis, time, place, person, and discourse deixis are presented briefly. Then, it is suggested that in PW translation the translator should scrupulously sludy the reference of the original and flexibly render in TL.Chapter 3 and chapter 4 are concerned with the pragmatic translation of PW via applying some principles in conversational implicature, including cooperation and politeness.Cooperation, perhaps of a rather more basic type, is an inherent feature of all kinds of linguistic communication. It follows that the violation of cooperation should be taken into account before translating PW.Politeness is defined as the means employed to show awareness of another person's face. Hence, there is no doubt that the translator would try all means to avoid ignorance of the reader's face.Chapter 5 reveals that universal is human communication which could never transcend human imagining. As a result, the illocutionary functions of all human communication are destined to be comprehensible across the cultural difference. Good translation practice not only requires sound comprehension of illocutionary functions in a SL text, it also requires that TL text be constructed and edited as reasonable in the TL.Relevance theory enlightens to pragmatic translation that the functional equivalence in translation is to give consideration to reader's cognition. In chapter 6, the interaction among the author of SL, the translator, and the reader of TL is mentioned and discussed in order to obtain the optimal reference.