A Pragmatic Approach To Literary Translation

Literary translation refers to the translation of literary works, mainly fiction, poetry and prose. As Mao Dun says, "Literary translation is to reproduce the original artistic images in another language so that the reader of translation may be inspired, moved and aesthetically entertained in the same way as one reads the original" ( Liu Zhongde, 1991: 104). Literature is a form of art using language to create artistic images, the language features, together with the represented cultural information and the expressive, emotive and aesthetic functions of literary texts constitute the particularities of literary translation.Beginning with the particularities, this thesis first probes into the limitations and the inadequacy of some major translation issues, such as the "literal Vs free" dispute, "faithful Vs smooth" argument and translation equivalence. The thesis continues with a concise introduction to the recent advancement of pragmatics and a profound analysis of the applicability of pragmatic theories to translation studies and practice, coming up with a pragmatic look at the nature of translation. Pragmatics tries to find how the intended meaning gets communicated, so, translation, seen from a pragmatic point of view, is to translate the original writer's intention.This thesis, afterwards, exemplifies the application of pragmatics to literary translation studies, translating and translation criticism by illustrating a series of case studies. Based on this exemplification, two issues are mainly focused on. First, translation equivalence, reviewed from the pragmatic approach, is established by synthesizing all the pragmatic parameters, e.g. using a combination of language knowledge and world knowledge with reference to the source text and the acceptability of target text to its readers. Therefore, pragmatic equivalence should be followed as a basic translation principle. Another is about the translation of pragmatic implicatures. Surface meaning is not what the writer intends to express. What is hidden behind the surface meaning---implicatures is what the writer really...