A Pragmatic Approach To CE/EC Translation

Pragmatics is a quite new field of linguistics. In 1938, it was first introduced by Charles Morris as a branch of semiotics, and by the early 1980s, it had been generally accepted as one of the basic branches of linguistics. With its rapid development, pragmatics has been correlated with society, culture and cognition, and has become an interdisciplinary study.This paper supports the view that translating is a communicative process which takes place within a social context. Translation is a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural communication, and it involves the transference of meaning between two languages. Since meanings are coated with culture and determined by the communicative intention of the speaker or writer in a given context, then pragmatics, which studies particular utterances in particular situations, plays an important part in the process of translation. This paper is an attempt to apply some of the pragmatic theories to CE/EC translation. It consists of five chapters. Chapter One Introduction"Pragmatics deals with particular utterances in particular situations and is especially concerned with the various ways in which the many social contexts of language performance can influence interpretation." (He Ziran, 1992:19) Thus pragmatics studies the meaning, not as generated by the linguistic system but as conveyed and manipulated by participants in a communicative situation. Translation is an intercultural communication, and it roughly consists of three steps: understanding, transferring and reproducing, among which the first step is the fundamental one. Pragmatic knowledge could assist the translator to understand the source text deeply and grasp the intended meaning. So it is well applied to the study of translation. Chapter Two The Concepts of PragmaticsThis chapter first explains what pragmatics is. Due to its high complexity, it is not easy to give pragmatics a single, complete and exact definition. If we define it as "the scientific study of language in use", it may seem too summarized and abstract. Here some other definitions are illustrated so that we could get a more specific and explicit comprehension of it. Among these definitions, two elementary concepts single out for attention: meaning and context. Meaning is one of the most ambiguous and controversial terms in semantics and pragmatics. From the linguistic point of view, language could at least express two levels of meaning: sentence meaning and utterance meaning. Grice classifies language meaning under two types: natural meaning and non-natural meaning/meaning-nn. In nature, sentence-meaning is basically equivalent to natural meaning and utterance-meaning to meaning-nn. We could generally say that semantics concentrates on meaning that comes from purely linguistic knowledge, that is, sentence-meaning, while pragmatics concentrates on the aspects of meaning that could not be predicted by linguistic knowledge alone and must take into account of the context. The term "context" was first put forward by Malinowski in 1923. We should be clear that context is a dynamic, not a static concept. From the point of translation, we divide context into four kinds: linguistic context, paralinguistic context, socio-cultural context and stylistic context. Chapter Three A Brief Account of Translation StudiesTranslating is complex and fascinating; in fact, it is probably the most complex type of event in the history of the cosmos. (Richards, 1953) So there is no agreed definition of it. Here we list some relatively comprehensive definitions of it. From these, it is clear that the central problem of translation practice seems to be that of finding target language "equivalents".Several debates in translation studies are discussed here. First, process and product. The term "translation" can refer to two meanings: the process (to translate; the activity rather than the tangible object) and the product of the process of translating (i.e. the translated text). The view underlies this thesis is of translating as...