A Study On The Equivalent Effect Of Pragmatic Meaning In Literary Translation

Translation involves at least two languages and two cultural traditions, so it' s essential for a successful translator to solve such problems as how to deal with the cultural implications in a source language and how to use the most appropriate techniques to successfully convey these implications into the target language. The range, nature, and degree of difficulty of the problems may vary according to the cultural and linguistic differences between the two languages concerned. During the long translation history, both theorists and translators have been working on these problems, and have defined translation' s nature, principles, translatability, contents, etc, and introduced tremendous theories and strategies. Although an independent subject, in stead of developing in isolation, the study of translation also makes use of theories of other fields especially linguistics to better itself, consequently, to each stream of language theory, there corresponds a theory of translation. This thesis is a tentative study of how to achieve equivalent effect in literary translation by using the implicature theory of pragmatics. The concept of translation equivalence has always been a controversial issue in modern translation studies. Although many translators and translation theorists like Nida and Cartford have defined it from different perspectives, there are still conflicts and differences as to its implication and the possibility of its realization. This paper proposes that the term "equivalence" is by no means the "relationship of symmetry" in mathematics but a comprehensive term related to all aspects of translation such as languages and cultures. As a result, what the translator tries to do is notto achieve absolute equivalent but to make the target readers interpret the text as similarly as the source language readers do. This "similar" effect is of course relative but not absolute, so the term of translation equivalence is only a relative concept other than an absolute one.This paper begins with a brief review of the development of translation theories both in China and in the west, especially the theory of pragmatic equivalence. Based on the analysis of these theories, this paper further points out that it' s essential to find a "breakthrough point" in order to make equivalence theory more practical in translation practice and evaluation. However, in literary translation, the biggest obstacle the translators face is how to properly understand the implicatures of the SLT and transfer them into the TLT. This paper proposes that, under the help of H.P. Grice' s cooperative principle, it' s most likely to ensure the "cooperation" between the original author and the target readers in literary translation, that is to have the target readers understand and feel as much as possible the information launched by the original author, while the implicature theory deals with the understanding of conversational implicature, namely pragmatic meaning. After discussing the contents of cooperative principle, the acquisition of pragmatic meaning as well as the applicability of cooperation principle in literary translation, this paper puts forward the principle of pragmatic equivalence: to achieve the equivalence of pragmatic meaning by making use of such pragmatic theories as implicature theory. This paper concludes that pragmatic equivalence is both a good approach to achieve translation equivalence, and also an applicable maxim to evaluate translation works.On the basis of equivalence theory and implicature theory, this paper tentatively studies the achievement of the equivalence of pragmatic meaning in literary translation from the following three aspects: how to acquire pragmatic meaning; how to understand the pragmatic meaning; how to expressthe pragmatic meaning in the TL. Besides, it analyzes the equivalence principle of pragmatic meaning and discusses the guiding function of this principle in both translation practice and translation evaluation through detailed examples.This paper being a tentative study on the pragmatic equi...