Translation Study Of Vocative Pragmatic Texts From The Perspective Of Perlocutionary Equivalence

For a very long time, the concept of translation equivalence has been one of the most important as well as the most problematic and controversial issues in the history of translation studies. However, the question is no longer how equivalence may be achieved but, increasingly, what kind of equivalence can be achieved. So this term will be further analyzed and discussed from different points of view and approached from many different perspectives. The perlocutionary equivalence in discussion is just proposed on the basis of a new perspective----Speech Act Theory. According to Austin's theory, a speaker may perform three types of acts simultaneously when he or she is speaking. They are locutionary act, illocutionary act and perlocutionary act. While translating, the translator should always focus his or her attention on the real intention of the original author and the readers of the target text. The translation should not merely seek the equivalence of surface structure. Instead, the translation should try every means to achieve locutionary equivalence, illocutionary equivalence and perlocutionary equivalence.In recent years, influenced by the development of pragmatics, the translation of pragmatic texts has been more and more focused on in the field of translation. Pragmatic texts are so broad that they cover every aspect in human society. Based on Newmark's classification on texts, we can accordingly classify pragmatic texts into expressive pragmatic texts, informative pragmatic texts and vocative pragmatic texts. It is text type that determines the perspective of translation, for example, a public speech or an advertisement focusing on readers'response maybe tend to the achievement of perlocutionary equivalence, while a technical text or an academic article focusing on conveying information might tend to the achievement of locutionary equivalence.However, there exist many problems in the translation of pragmatic texts. Traditional translation approaches fail to produce on the target readers the potential effect as close as possible to that obtained on the original readers. For example, Nida's functional equivalence will lose some alien cultural information to some extent; Communicative translation is only concerned with the direct purpose of communication and linguistic meaning in the process of communication, but has not fully taken into account other possible meanings. Therefore, a new translation approach is called for to guide the translation of pragmatic texts. This thesis is to apply perlocutionary equivalence to the translation of vocative pragmatic texts, and proposes that the translation of vocative pragmatic texts tends to the achievement of perlocutionary equivalence while considering locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary equivalence. For the characteristics and the purpose of vocative pragmatic texts, this thesis proposes that perlocutionary equivalence can be seen as the translation principle of vocative pragmatic texts. Based on an analysis of typical vocative pragmatic texts such as advertisements, tourist materials and public signs, the writer of this thesis comes to a conclusion: perlocutionary equivalence is useful to guide the translation of vocative pragmatic texts. In the translation process, the translator is required to bear in mind the potential effect of target text and produce a version that is comprehensible and acceptable to the target readers. Owing to great differences in language and culture, this thesis further proposes some translation strategies for achieving perlocutionary equivalence in translating vocative pragmatic texts.