A Study On Pragmatic Equivalence In Translation From The Perspective Of Pragmatics

Translation is a cross-linguistic and cross- cultural communicative activity. Its aim is to achieve the maximal equivalence in meaning. Pragmatics is a study of meanings in specific contexts, thus applying the theories of pragmatics into translation of fictional dialogues can activate translation research and at the same time, offer a new perspective to explain he problems in translation and finally achieve the goal of pragmatic equivalence between source language and target language.Dialogue is a popular artistic form in novels and short stories. Large portions of almost any novel consist of talk between characters. The dialogue in fiction is multifunctional and can be regarded as the most impressive and memorable part in fiction. However, despite its significant position in the creation of fiction, there are few studies in this field because of its extreme complexity. This dissertation chooses the dialogues of Hong Lou Meng as the cut-in point, considering that dialogues occupy a greater portion of the volume of the whole book and be taken as the soul of this masterpiece, thus the translation of dialogues in Hong Lou Meng seems to be a hard work and deserves more deep research.This thesis aims at applying theories of pragmatics to interpreting how to achieve pragmatic equivalence in the translation of dialogues in Hong Lou Meng. With examples from the two English versions of Hong Lou Meng (one by David Hawkes (1973),The Story of the Stone and the other by Yang Hsienyi and Gladys Yang (1978), A Dream of Red Mansions) as the object of this thesis, the author attempts to discuss how translators are able to interpret the intended force in the SL and reproduce it in the TL appropriately with the help of four principles of pragmatics, namely, context, speech acts, cooperative principle(CP)and conversational implicature(CI), and politeness principle(PP), so as to achieve pragmatic equivalence under the influence of linguistic factors, cultural factors and ideology of translators in their translation. The research of this thesis will help offer a new way of thinking and provide methods to fictional dialogue translation and can be taken as a guideline to translation practice to some extent.