On The Chinese Translations Of Wuthering Heights-Comparison Between Yang Yi's Version And Fang Ping's Version Under Pragmatic Views

Literary translation has played the role of promoting cultural exchanges among different countries. However, translation critics have various viewpoints on the standards or norms to evaluate literary translation results. This paper aims to apply the pragmatic perspective to the evaluation of literary translation, in particular, the translation of Withering Heights by Fang Ping and Yang Yi respectively. Generally speaking, by comparison of the two Chinese versions under pragmatic views, it is intended to find their strong points and weak points, and furthermore, the possible factors that have cast influence upon the results. By doing some tentative discussions of the limitations set by the author, the translator, and the target reader and the responding environments they produce, this paper puts forward a pragmatic approach for an objective and feasible evaluation of literary translation. The author hopes that it will give researchers a better insight into the advantages mat pragmatic evaluation will supply.This paper is divided into five parts: chapter one supplies the background information of the author and the two translators. In chapter two, it discusses various critic viewpoints contributed to the author and her book, Wuthering Heights. In chapter three, it focuses on the motive that has driven the author of this paper to adopt a pragmatic view to compare the two Chinese translations. Then in chapter four, the focus shifts to a detailed discussion on application of pragmatic theories in the comparison work, with a highlighted attention on the practice guided by the assessment principles proposed in this paper. In this paper, the author tentatively puts forward two evaluation norms entitled "the optimal relevance norm" and "the contextual norm" for translation results. They are based upon Wilson and Sperber's relevance theory and the contextual implicature viewpoint of pragmatics. After assessment of both Chinese translations in a pragmatic perspective, this paper reaches a conclusion: the contextual factors for translation practice have a direct effect on the variation of translation results. Furthermore, within limitations, contextual factors and other relevant factors will help the translators to construct a most relevant context intheir translation texts which will lead the reader to understand and appreciate them effectively.