A Tentative Application Of Pragmatics In The Practice Of Translation

This dissertation, as the title indicates, is an interdisciplinary investigation of cross-cultural communication. It supports the view that translating is a communicative process which takes place within a social context. Translation involves the transference of meaning between two languages. Since meaning is determined by the linguistic and non-linguistic contexts and by the communicative intentions of the speaker or writer, then pragmatics, which studies meaning in use and in context, can undoubtedly shed some light on the process and product of translation.This thesis is an attempt to testify both theoretical and practical usefulness of pragmatics by grafting major pragmatic theories or notions onto the science and art of translation, thus achieving pragmatic equivalence. The principle of pragmatic equivalence is appropriate for the vast majority of texts including non-literary writing, publicity, fictions and so on. Using examples mainly taken from books by novelists in China and abroad, the present author attempts to analyze, explore and evaluate how the pragmatic knowledge can utilized in the practice of translation.The entire thesis is made up of 9 chapters, the first 2 dealing with main issues of pragmatic studies in translation, the following 6 elucidating respectively the application of pragmatic principles and theories in CE/EC1 translation, namely, deixis, speech acts, conversational implicture, presupposition, politeness and relevance. Under the guidance of these theories different translation strategies or principles are suggested to translators in this thesis: to reveal the force of context-dependent deictic terms in source text to target text, so as to attain the pragmatic equivalence; to achieve equivalence in illocutionary force by paying attention to three aspects: language form, cultural orientation and the degree of the illocutionary force; to turn the conversational implicature into proper forms in the target language under cooperative principle; to acquire the knowledge that the author presupposes their readers to have, to estimate to what extent the target audience is likely to share the presuppositions and to decide the best way to pass on the information with a minimum of disruption; to distinguish differences in politeness norms between Chinese and English before deciding whether adopting the politeness norms of the target language or translating literally; to correctly understand writer's intention and target reader's cognitive environment and then adopt appropriate means to achieve optimal relevance in the version.It is pointed out in the final chapter that pragmatics provides a new perspective and scientific method of translation analysis and can effectively guide the practice of translation. However, we should not expect that the pragmatic approach to translation could solve all the problems of translation, because problems involved in translation are of various kinds and encompass many aspects.