Communicative Rationality And Literary Translation

To a certain extent, translation is increasingly seen as a process, in which the translator encounters many choices and alternatives. In addition, the translation process includes understanding and expressing, namely a cognitive process. Scholars spare no effort to find a general rule accounting for the thinking process. Translation has long been held as a communication activity. Therefore, communication approach becomes one of the choices to study translation.In this thesis, based on Jürgen Habermas' Theory of Communicative Action, the author applies communicative rationality into Literary Translation study and tries to give some analysis on the cognitive process of literary translation from the communicative rationality perspective, with a special reference to the English versions of Ah Q Zheng Zhuan. The thesis can be divided into four chapters.Since the study is grounded on Theory of Communicative Action, the thesis gives in detail some important concepts relating to this theory in Chapter One. The following aspects are covered in this regard: communicative subject, communicative background information, communicative medium and communicative purpose. And then theoretical foundation of Theory of Communicative Action is probed into. Chapter Two makes a survey on the construction of communicative rationality in literary translation, in which literary translation as a special communicative action is explained firstly. After that this chapter illustrates the differences between instrumental rationality and communicative rationality, and then concentrates on the construction of communicative rationality in translation study from two perspectives, namely the "three communication levels" ideology and the "intersubjectivity" ideology.In Chapter Three the author begins with the correlation among cognition, communication and literary translation. Then the author points out that the application of communicative rationality in literary translation can be elaborated through its embodiment in the cognitive process of literary translation. After that, the author throws efforts on an exploration of the three cognitive stages of literary translation (the reading stage, the intermediate stage and the expressing stage). The author discusses communication of the translator with other communicative subjects in "three dimensionalities" ("Morality" Dimensionality, "Convention" Dimensionality and "Mentality" Dimensionality) during the three cognitive stages respectively.In Chapter Four, the author analyzes some examples cited from Chinese famous literary works: Ah Q Zheng Zhuan and their English versions, evaluating and discussing these examples from the perspective of communicative rationality.Finally, this thesis arrives at the following conclusion: literary translation is a complex communicative action. Communicative rationality has always played a decisive role in the whole cognitive process of translation. Under the guidance of rationality, translation activity has been transferred from the pure code-changing process to the establishment of interpersonal relation on the basis of speech validities, and from the subject-object relationship that emphasizes single subjectivity to the intersubjective relationship in which several subjects can have equal dialogues and communication. In this way, the maximum acceptance and aesthetic value of the translation version can be achieved.The rationality-theoretic account for translation has not been complete yet. Since no theory is perfect, Habermas' Theory of Communicative Action is no exception. This thesis is supposed to apply communicative rationality in the cognitive process of translation, and to provide a new perspective in the analysis of different versions of a same works.