On Translation Of Conversational Implicature In Fictional Dialogue

Dialogue between characters in fiction is the most important and fascinating part.Fictional dialogue has its communicative, individual, sociocultural features and it playsan important role in revealing the character's personality, reflecting the social reality,attracting the readers and advancing the story plot. However, very few monographs athome and abroad have specifically discussed the translation of fictional dialogue. Littlestudy has been done on it in works such as Chapter8in Literary Stylistics and FictionalTranslation by Shen Dan (1995) and Chapter6in Pragmatics in Chinese Culture by QianGuanlian (1997). Very few articles can be found to focus on the translation of fictionaldialogue in the kernel foreign language journals published in the past decades. What'smore, we notice that these limited studies are confined to the framework of theories, suchas aesthetics, literary stylistics, sociolinguistics, etc., but very few of them have focusedon the translation of implicature or intended meaning in fictional dialogue. Dialoguestake up almost two thirds in Jane Eyre. Although translation studies of Jane Eyre havebeen done fully since its publishing, few studies explored the translation of fictionaldialogue and its rich conversational implicatures from the perspective of pragmatictheory and hence this thesis.Grice's conversational implicature theory is one of the most important theories inPragmatics. The theory points out that the reason why people can communicate with oneanother coherently and smoothly is that all the involved interlocutors must obey theCooperative Principle (CP), that is, they have to be correspondent with their mutualpurpose and direction throughout the talk exchange. In speech communication theconversational implicature is generated when the speaker violates the CP and one ormore of its related maxims and the hearer has to guess his intended meaning according tothe specific context. The conversational implicature has its cultural characteristics and isaffected by the writer's/speaker's intention; therefore, in the translation process thetranslator should reproduce the implicated meaning with its both linguistic and cultural features. Characters in fictional dialogue always violate some regularity and adoptimplicit and indirect expressions to mean more than what is actually said, so theimplicature is sometimes difficult to comprehend because of the conversational situation,the social and cultural context, different opinions, interests, beliefs and backgroundknowledge of both interlocutors. Therefore, in fictional translation, it is of great help toapply the conversational implicature theory to analyze the fictional dialogue and guidethe translator to interpret its implicated meaning hidden between the lines and thusincrease the accuracy of his/her translation.This thesis begins with a very important concept in pragmatics—meaning andfocuses on introducing Grice's Cooperative Principle (CP) and the conversationalimplicature theory (CI). The generation of conversational implicature is explained byanalyzing daily conversations and some related translation theories are also introduced inthis chapter. Chapter2focuses on the application of the CI theory to fictional dialogue.Conversational implicatures in Jane Eyre are analyzed in detail under the guidance of theCI theory. On the basis of CI theory, chapter3focuses on the understanding andreproduction of conversational implicatures to realize pragmatic equivalence in fictionaldialogue translation and summarizes concrete translation methods by comparing twoChinese versions of Jane Eyre (Zhu Qingying,1980；Song Zhaolin,2007). In the processof comparing the two Chinese versions, the author of the thesis finds that they applydifferent translation methods to render different dialogues. When dealing with the samedialogue they will choose more or less the same translation method, but they are a littledifferent in diction. Zhu Qingying prefers to translate the dialogue literally so that hertranslation is closer to the form and literal meaning of the original, whereas Song Zhaolintends to translate the meaning of the dialogue and pays particular attention to antithesisand rhythm so that the aesthetic and colloquial characteristics of the fictional dialoguecan be fully reflected in his translation.The thesis studies the fictional translation from the perspective of pragmatic theory, focusing on the accurate understanding and conveyance of conversational implicature inthe translation process of fictional dialogue under the guidance of Grice's CI theory andthe CP. The author finds that only the TL text which genuinely conveys theconversational implicature hidden in the SL text can be called the best translation faithfulto the original. The thesis tries to apply pragmatic theory to analyze the generation andinterpretation of conversational implicature in fiction and discusses the feasibility ofapplying the theory of CI to translation studies and concludes that this theory plays aunique role in guiding the translator to discover and accurately understand the implicatedmeaning of fictional dialogue. It also contributes the translator to convey the deeperintended meaning in the target language text. The thesis also summarizes the translationmethods by comparing two Chinese versions of Jane Eyre. Different translators oftenemploy different methods to convey different conversational implicatures. But no matterwhat methods the translator uses, the prerequisite is that he/she has to accuratelyunderstand the SL conversational implicature, which can then be successfully conveyedin the TL text. Only in this way can help the readers to grasp the intended meaning of theoriginal and appreciate foreign fictions better.The significance of the thesis lies in two aspects. It not only sheds light on conveyingthe intended meaning of fictional dialogue in the translated versions, but also verifies thestrong validity of pragmatic theory in literature translation.