The Transference Of Pragmatic Presuppositions In The English Translation Of Tang Poems

Presupposition originated with arguments in philosophy. Ferge, a philosopher and architect of modern logic, raised many issues which became central to discussions of presupposition in the following years. Afterwards, plenty of linguists have studied presupposition and a certain range of presuppositional phenomena has been adduced in the literature. Researchers find out that there are two different types of presuppositions in natural language - semantic presupposition and pragmatic presupposition. In other words, there are two kinds of approach to presuppositions, due to different ways of viewing language. In the semantic approach, presupposition is usually defined strictly in terms of truth-conditions. But since 1973, semantic theories of presupposition have largely been abandoned since semantic presuppositions fail on many factors. In contrast to the semantic approach, the pragmatic approach regards sentences as the utterances of individuals engaged in a communication act and presupposition is usually believed to be connected with linguistic and non-linguistic knowledge. And many researchers on translation, such as Nord and Vermeer, have studied presupposition thoroughly. From the perspective of translation, researchers find that it is easier to transfer the semantic presupposition in translation, but how to transfer pragmatic presupposition to target readers is a problem that needs to be further studied.Tang poetry assuredly marks the zenith in the history of Chinese classical poetry. This thesis attempts to solve the problem of the transference of pragmatic presuppositions to the target readers in the English translation of Tang poems.The first chapter provides a brief introduction of presupposition including semantic presupposition and pragmatic presupposition. The second chapter focuses on the pragmatic presuppositions in Tang poems and their aesthetic value. In this chapter, pragmatic presuppositions are divided into six kinds. Image and Yijing are important categories in Chinese aesthetics with a distant source and a long stream. Images are significant in poetry since images can be represented through language to help poets toconstruct and focus their setting, to heighten the reader's emotional reaction to a character, to build atmosphere, to communicate ideas by implication and to increase the aesthetic impact of a poem. Through Yijing, poets can describe a scene difficult to portray and make the inexhaustible meaning understood. Since presuppositions in Tang poems play a significant role in helping build images and Yijing, they have an important aesthetic role.The third chapter is the theoretical study of the transference of pragmatic presuppositions in the translation of Tang poems. It is very important for the translator to reproduce the presuppositions for the target reader. However, one of the problems in the transference of presuppositions in Tang poems is that the literally translated words and phrases may sometimes trigger the same or very similar presuppositions, sometimes totally different pragmatic presuppositions and sometimes no pragmatic presuppositions on the part of English readers. This chapter attempts to solve this problem by recommending some points for attention.In the fourth chapter, different English versions of some Tang poems are evaluated and five methods of transferring pragmatic presuppositions in the Tang poems are demonstrated. Though to some extent these methods are useful, the possibility of transference is limited, so, limitations of this thesis are pointed out at the end of the chapter.To sum up, in order to transfer the presuppositions in Tang poems, the translators should pay attention to some points. First of all, the translator must fully understand the original text and the presuppositions in Tang poems. The second point is that they should make an adequate evaluation of target readers' access to the background knowledge embedded in the presupposition triggers. Finally, since it is not easy for the translator to find triggers in English to retain the pragmatic presuppositi...