Pragmatic Contrastive Analyses Of Three Chinese Versions Of The Return Of The Native

Thomas Hardy is an outstanding British regional novelist, and The Return of the Native is one of his major novels, which has profound ideological contents and dramatic plot. The famous translator Zhang Guruo published two Chinese versions of it in 1958 and 1991, and the scholar Wang Shouren published his Chinese version in 1998. In the perspective of pragmatics, this thesis analyses and compares these three Chinese versions of The Return of the Native.Pragmatics is a new discipline that studies how speakers of a language use it to effect successful communication. It is of great theoretical reference and practical value to the translation of literary texts. This thesis attempts to apply pragmatics to the translation of Hardy's The Return of the Native as a probe of interdisciplinary research method in literature, translation and linguistics. In the translation of The Return of the Native, dealing with the subtitles and countryside dialects involves choices of style; coping with the dialogues between the main characters could be seen as reproducing the speech acts;while rendering the psychological descriptions and cultural loaded discourse in Chinese, context ingredients such as cultural differences and mentalities are covered. Therefore, this thesis employs register theory,speech act theory and context theory of pragmatics to analyse and compare the three Chinese versions of The Return of the Native. It consists of four chapters in addition to an introduction and a conclusion.The introduction offers a brief of Hardy's novel The Return of the Native and its three Chinese versions as well as the main research objects of pragmatics, and points out the feasibility of applying pragmatic theories to the contrastive analyses of the three translated versions. Chapter 1 introduces Hardy's status in English literature, and reviews the status quo of studies on Hardy at home and abroad. It introduces and analyses The Return of the Native, its two translators Zhang Guruo and Wang Shouren, and their three Chinese versions. This chapter also introduces the definition, the two major traditions, the current situation and developing tendency of pragmatics, and combines pragmatics and literary translation to interpret the feasibility of applying pragmatic theories to the contrastive analyses of the three Chinese versions of The Return of the Native.Chapter 2 introduces Halliday's register theory and applies it to the analysis of the translation of The Return of the Native. Register theory holds that language varies with its function, and a register is the type of language which is selected as appropriate to the type of situation. Three social variables determine the register: field of discourse, tenor of discourse, and mode of discourse. As regards the translation of the subtitles and utterances of the unique character Christian in the three Chinese versions of The Return of the Native in the perspective of reproducing the register features, Zhang's second version does the best in subtitle translation, and his two versions do better than Wang's version when translating Christian's utterances.Chapter 3 compares and analyses the translation of the dialogues in the three Chinese versions of The Return of the Native mainly in the perspective of Searle's classification of illocutionary acts and his indirect speech act theory. It is concluded that Zhang's two versions do much better in dialogue translation than Wang's version.Chapter 4 compares and analyses the translation of psychological descriptions and cultural loaded discourse of the three Chinese versions of The Return of the Native in the perspective of context theory initiated by Verschueren, according to whom, pragmatics is a perspective on language, and language has three key properties, i.e. variability, negotiability and adaptability, and contextual correlates of adaptability are one angle of investigation. In terms of communicative and linguistic contexts, both translators have merits and shortcomings and Zhang's two versions do a little better than Wang's version.The conclusion summarizes the previous chapters and points out that both translators of The Return of the Native have merits and shortcomings. Generally speaking, Zhang prefers making a good effort to find language in accord with Chinese habits of society, culture, language, etc. while Wang is more inclined to preserve the form of the original. Zhang does better in the pragmatic perspective on the whole.