Pragmatic Equivalence And Hawkes' Version Of Hong Lou Meng

Translation equivalence, as a disputable issue, has been discussed for over 2000 years in translation studies. In this process, a lot of scholars have adopted multi-disciplinary methods to study it from different perspectives, as a result of which kinds of equivalence have appeared, such as formal equivalence, semantic equivalence, pragmatic equivalence, etc. The author of this thesis, having reviewed translation equivalence, takes pragmatic equivalence as the focus. For one thing, pragmatic equivalence is in agreement with the nature of translation. Nida asserts " translating means translating meaning." The real meaning of an utterance is not necessarily the liteal meaning. In many cases, utterances have illocutionary meaning implied, which reflects the user's real intention or communicative purpose. That is exactly what pragmatic equivalence pursues. For another, pragmatic equivalence may in some sense solve the dispute between literal translation and free translation. In the pursuit of pragmatic equivalence, as long as the user's intention or the communicative function is realized, any method may be used. This is a dynamic view. Then the author furthers her analysis, and finds pragmatic equivalence applies better to literary texts and works abounding in cultural factors for the rich illocutionary meanings implied in them. Besides the theoretical explanations, the author also uese Hawkes' version of Hong Lou Meng, The Story of the Stone, as the text of case study. By this case study, the author finds pragmatic equivalence can be achieved and it should be set as an aim or principle when pragmatic meaning is implied in an utterance. To achieve pragmatic equivalence any method may be used as long as it can effectively convey the original writer's communicative intention. In Chapter five, the author lists some strategies used by Hawkes in "The Story of the Stone", which may be a reference for other translators.However, any theory or principle has its limitations, and pragmatic equivalence is no exception. For instance, in such a text as poetry, the translator should give priority to syntactic equivalence in that the form of poetry itself is meaningful. And also the translating purpose of some texts is for the strict transfer of culture, so we can't still blindly pursue pragmatic equivalence and permit the change of the original cultural images. To sum up, pragmatic equivalence is not applied to all cases. In translating weshould take text type, translating purpose and readership into full consideration and choose the appropriate principles and methods.The author is quite sure that with the widening communication between different cultures, pragmatic equivalence and semantic equivalence will have more in common. Then the translation work will be easier and people in different countries will communicate better.