Investigating Into Product Description Translation From The Perspectives Of Illocutionary Force And Relevance

With economic globalization and regional integration necessitating international exchange, the inflow of foreign products and export of domestic products have been noticed as important channels for enriching the domestic consumers'daily life and opening foreign market for domestic goods. Along with this trend, the translation of product description plays a vital role in facilitating cross-boundary product exchange, thus economic development. This thesis about product description translation (PDT hereafter) is intended to make analysis into product description translation from two pragmatic perspectives: illocutionary force and relevance, and decipher into the problems thereof so as to better carry out the pragmatic force through the translated text. The ultimate purpose of this attempt is to provide high quality translation with due equivalent pragmatic effects, translation that facilitates social life and economic growth. The thesis falls into six chapters.Chapter 1 introduces the notion of pragmatic translation. Pragmatics studies the language use while translation is a cross-cultural activity related to language use. Pragmatic translation is an interdisciplinary translation concept that creatively promotes the employment of pragmatic theories in the translating process. Pragmatic translation attempts to yield renderings that strike pragmatic equivalence between the original and the translated texts. Chapter 2 offers a brief study of the functions, categories and stylistic features of product description. The language of product description is informative, explicative and factual, rather than literary or humorous, often referring in special terminology and complex style to realities, concepts and distinctions.The subtypes may have minor differences in features, but they are in general sharing some same basic rules, for example, they all make constant use of functional words and nominalized structures. This is determined by the designed function of product description—an informative type of text, which is to provide the readership with valuable information about the operation, usage, maintenance or watch-outs of certain product.Chapter 3 illustrates the translation of product description in view of the features of it and from the perspectives of speech act theory and illocutionary force.In general, speech act means to do things with words, or utterances. Every utterance is usually reified under the label of'illocutionary force', which is the most salient pragmatic purpose of an utterance, the performative intention that the utterance serves. The successful transfer of illocutionary force is an important criterion for successful translation. Chapter 4 investigates into the translation in the guidance of relevance. According to the relevance theory framework, translation is captured as a dynamic, double ostensive-inferential process that essentially involves the author, the translator and the translation reader. As an act of inter-linguistic interpretation, translators need to make dynamic inferences about what the author truly intends within constantly changing contexts.Optimal relevance requires that that the translator transacts the text in such a manner that it may well yield the intended interpretation, offering the readership with adequate contextual effects and without putting them to unnecessary processing efforts.Chapter 5 analyses the reasons and causes of the problems in product description translation and suggests some solutions aiming at those problems, which may prove effective in increasing the likelihood of successful translation. No matter what the problem is, the main purpose is overcome the problems so as to positively transfer the pragmatic force on the basis of a full understanding of it. In a word, the translators should strive to produce proper renderings upon a self-awareness to balance between pragmatic equivalence, communicative equivalence and functional equivalence.Chapter 6 delves into the cross-cultural socio-pragmatic failures and pragma-linguistic failures in PDT, makes analysis of the cause and reasons of these failures and proposes a bunch of strategies and techniques to overcome the difficulties thrown up by the pragmatic failures.