Negative Pragmatic Transfer In Chinese-English Translation Of Publicity

Foreign publicity plays a crucial role in introducing China to the outside world. However, many problems and lapses have occurred in the materials, such as company profiles. product introduction, city profiles, trade fairs brochures, advertisements and pamphlets distributed at international meetings, etc. The very nature of the materials aiming at publicizing abroad China's strength and the latest development with Chinese characteristics increases the possibility of negative pragmatic transfer. As Thomas (1983:97) has pointed out, while grammatical error may reveal a speaker to be a less than proficient language-user, pragmatic failure reflects badly on him/her as a person. So a pragmatic failure is more destructive in communication.Researchers in this field mainly tackle the problems from translatological perspective. Drawing on the findings by scholars who studied negative pragmatic transfer in the speech act realization, this study investigates the occurrence of negative pragmatic transfer in some C-E translation of foreign publicity materials selected from some formal and informal publications in China. Evidence of negative pragmatic transfer is found at pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic levels. Those failures are mainly triggered by inappropriate pragmatic transfer of Chinese norms administered consciously or unconsciously by translators.The results reveal that C-E translation of foreign publicity materials is profoundly influenced by deeply-held Chinese sociocultural values and the idiosyncratic written communicative style of Chinese language. The author further analyzes some possible causes of negative pragmatic transfer in the translation of some publicity materials and some causal factors are indicated. Chinese translators of English perceive the Chinese-English equivalents in terms of "conventions of usage" to be significantly more similar to each other than the L1-L2 (first language-second language) equivalents established in terms of "communicative functions". This clearly indicates that real functional equivalence is not clear at all to some Chinese English translators. Successful cases of handling sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic failures by inhibiting an urge to transfer Chinese norms in English translation are demonstrated.Finally, the pedagogical implications of the findings are provided for teaching and learning pragmatics in the EFL classroom, especially for new generation Chinese English users engaged in writing and translating foreign publicity materials.