Pragmatic Differences And Translation Of Address Terms Between English And Chinese

As an important part of language, address terms have drawn the concern of socialinguitists in the 1960s. Based on their researches, this thesis explores the pragmatic differences of address terms between English and Chinese through contrastive studies. Applying the fruit of pragmatic study to the translation practice, the author probes into pragmatic strategies and translation techniques to smooth pragmatic differences and achieve pragmatically equivalent effect in the translation of address terms.To start with, this thesis defines and classifies the address terms and generalizes the fruits of socialinguistic studies. A pragmatic study is conducted mainly from two perspectives of speech act and social deixis. According to Austin's speech act theory, address terms can be used to perform certain acts, especially directive acts, such as warning, pleading, threatening, ordering, rebuking, and expressive acts to show a speaker's psychological state his/her feelings and attitudes. As social deixis, address terms can indicate communicators' mutual relationships, social status, social and cultural backgrounds, and also suggest the features of communication settings.A pragmatic study from these two perspectives reveals the two major pragmatic functions: act-performing function and social relation indicating function. An address term may have multiple functions. But the pragmatic meaning of an address term in a particular situation is determined by the context. Pragmatic meaning refers to the meanings both in linguistic context and social and cultural context. Pragmatic meanings fall into four categories: associative meaning, affective meaning, stylistic meaning, andfigurative meaning.After the exploration of pragmatic functions and meanings of address terms, the thesis makes an elaborate comparison of pragmatic differences of address terms between English and Chinese. The comparison is made from pramalinguistic and socialinguistic perspectives. Pramalinguistic differences lie in the following aspects: 1. The same address term may have different illocutionary forces and different application domains. 2. Different address terms may perform the same speech act. 3. The same address term may have different linguistic forms. Socialinguistic differences are mainlyreflected in the following two aspects: 1. In different cultures, the degrees to which people follow politeness principle are different. 2. People from different cultures set different values on the factors influencing the choices of address terms. The thesis also illustrates the pragmatic differences of the major categories of address terms.The existence of pragmatic differences makes it difficult to achieve pragmatically equivalent effect in the translation of address terms. To attain this goal, a translator should have bi-lingual and bi-cultural abilities. He/she should dig out the pragmatic meaning of a source language (SL) address term in the context, and then transfer it to the target language (TL). For this purpose, he/she should estimate TL readers' cognitive context. Context plays an important role in the two stages of translation: understanding and representation. Therefore the author comes up with the context principle to be observed in the translation. In order to convey the pragmatic meaning encoded in address terms, the author thinks a translator should take the following four points into full account: 1. communicators' mutual relationships; status, and social position; 2. the addresser's intention; 3. the addresser's emotion; 4. the features of communication settings. If a translator estimates that TL readers have trouble in understanding or may misunderstand a literally-translated address term due to pragmatic differences, he/ she should adopt some translation techniques to gap the differences. The author generalizes eight frequently-used techniques from a large number of literary works and their translated versions, and illustrates how and when to use them. A translator is supposed to apply these techniques flexibly according to...