A Pragmatic Study Of Person Deixis In C-E Poetry Translation

In the translation of classical Chinese poetry into English, a translator has to dealwith many problems and person deixis is one of the factors causing the problems.Person deixis holds different quotas in Chinese and English poetry. Since classicalChinese poetry features conciseness, the poems are dominant by lines with scarceperson deixis. On the contrary, person deixis is indispensable in English poetry owingto the grammatical rules and expression conventions of English. Therefore, persondeixis needs to be added in the English translation of classical Chinese poetry. Thetranslator is supposed to take many factors into consideration, including the poet’swriting motivation and intention, cultural background, social climate, etc. and decideon proper person deixis so as to best re-create the artistic conception of the originalpoetry. Different selection of person deixis results in different pragmatic effects..The thesis probes into strategies adopted in dealing with person deixis default inthe C-E translation of classical Chinese poetry. First of all, the author distinguishesChinese person deixis from English person deixis from their basic meaning andpragmatic implicatures. Secondly, by analyzing the features of Chinese poems andEnglish poems, the author shows that person deixis is often absent in Chinese poemswithout posing any damage on the completeness and effect of them. It even caters tothe aesthetics of Chinese poems—“Hazy Beauty”. Dissimilarly, person deixis isoften indispensable in English poems due to the linguistic requirement of the language.The difference in the use of person deixis gives rise to barriers in translation. Thirdly,the author illustrates ways of overcoming the barriers with a number of case studies.In the end, the author concludes that a translator should bear in mind one ultimateprinciple that qualified translation requires more than equivalence in form, but alsoequivalence in the pragmatic effect.