Literary Translation Criticism In The View Of The Theory Of Communicative Action

Literary translation criticism, an intermediary movement bridging translation activity and its social reception, is an important component in the field of translation study. Based on the theory of communicative action, this thesis aims at a theoretical study on the nature of literary translation criticism, the approach to translated text analysis, meaning understanding, and literary translation criticism criteria through a critical analysis of philologist paradigm, structuralist paradigm, and deconstructionist paradigm of literary translation criticism. There commonly exist two problems in the three paradigms: their fragile theoretical basis and the one-sidedness in their study. Habermas has been working on overcoming the defects of both structuralists' and deconstructionists' views of language. His theory of communicative action, which is based on a rational explanation of language centered communicative actions, offers us a theoretical basis to tackle these problems effectively.Literary translation is a special kind of communicative action in which literary translation criticism takes an active part with an aim to give a rational and scientific assessment on the quality of the communication and to find out to what extent the communication is successful. It inherently concerns the three worlds and stands on the three levels of the study of rationality simultaneously. There is a dialectical and unified subject-object-subject relationship among the participants. All the three paradigms of translation criticism confine their study within a single world and at a single level and thus cut the linkage between the elements in the chain of author-text-reader. They turn translation criticism into a monologue of one side.Habermas contends that any single speech act can be analyzed from its "double structures": the propositional structure and the performative structure. The former embodies the linguistic competence of the speaker while the latter embodies the communicative competence of the speaker. Both structuralist criticism and deconstructionist criticism split the inner connection between the double structures of speech acts. Structuralists focus on language itself and adopt an "internal research" approach to the text translated; deconstructionists focus on the factors outside language and take an "external research" approach to the text translated. The literary translation criticism based on the theory of the double structure of speech examines both the linguistic competence and the communicative competence according to the constructive rules of language and the regulative rules of speech respectively. It adopts an "integrated approach" in analyzing the translated text.Meaning understanding is of utmost importance to translation study. It is not only an interpretation of the syntactic-semantic structure of a subject sentence; it is a kind of tacit consent and cooperation reached through an agreement on the validity claims of speech acts among all the participants as well. The translator should not only study the language structure and the intention of the original work, he must also try to understand the validity claims the original work has laid out. What's more, he must make his work satisfy all the validity claims which would ensure the target text reader a good understanding of the text translated. Habermas brings the concept of understanding into the three worlds and the "formative background" of society via the medium of language. He takes social understanding as a reference standard and a technical testing of individual understanding and thereby deters successfully the absolutism and relativism in meaning understanding.Universal pragmatics, the linguistic basis of the theory of communicative action, aims at finding out the ways in which the participants of a speech act can choose utterances according to social norms and rules. The core task of universal pragmatics lies in reconstructing the universal validity claims, namely, comprehensibility, truth, lightness, and truthfulness for a possible understanding. These validity claims can be used as the criteria to judge whether a speech act is successful or not. We combine Habermas' analysis of the nature of literary works with the four validity claims of speech acts and put forward a new set of criteria for literary translation criticism, namely, the criteria of "truth", "harmonization", and "beauty".