The Application Of Pragmatic Principles In Literary Translation

Pragmatics is a quite new field of linguistics. It was first introduced by Charles Morris as a branch of semiotics in 1938, and by the early 1980s, it had been generally accepted as one of the basic branches of linguistics. It studies the meaning gained in interactive contexts and its communicative function, and associates the meaning of linguistic structures with the user and the particular concrete context Meaning and context are the basic concepts of pragmatics. Translation is a complex language communicative activity which takes place within a social context. Nida once said, " Translating means translating meaning". The main task of a translator is to convey to his/her reader all the possible meanings in a message and achieve an equivalent effect in the source language and the target language. Obviously, pragmatics can do something to translation study.This thesis aims to prove the possibility and necessity of the adoption of pragmatic principles in translation and to analyze the application of pragmatic principles to literary translation as well. After a brief introduction to the whole thesis, four chapters are listed: The first chapter presents a general introduction to the development of pragmatic and probes into the basic concepts in pragmatic studies. Chapter Two attempts to analyze the main difficulties translation study confronts. A new perspective might be helpful to translation: pragmatics. Chapter Three is about the theoretical framework. Two pragmatic principles are illustrated: cooperative principle and politeness principle. In the sphere of pragmatics they take their own important place and are representative and initiative in their concerned field. Chapter Four is centered on the application of pragmatic principles to C-E literary translation. Many examples translated by notable translators are illustrated to find out how to reproduce the pragmatic equivalent effect in target language (TL). I make a conclusion at last to restate that pragmatics is a new and useful perspective for translation. The concrete and universal principles in the application of languageenable the translator to consider both the surface structure and the deep structure of an utterance, and accord importance in both the semantic content and pragmatic features. However, it is far from a systematic theory. It is still in its formative stage. There are still some problems remained to be solved. With so many scholars' interests in the field, I believe that this theory will become increasingly perfect.