A Comparative Study Of Pragmatic Features Between Chinese And English:Take Camel Xiangzi And Its Translated Version As Examples

Chao Yuanren, a celebrated Chinese linguist, has once said,"The so-called linguistic theory is, in fact, the comparison of languages, namely, the scientific conclusions derived from a comprehensive contrastive study of the languages of different nations in the world"(Wang Li,1983:40). This indicates that comparative analysis is the basic method in linguistic study. Any contrastive study of languages is based on a certain linguistic theory. For a long time, many scholars have studied Camel Xiangzi and its English version from different perspectives:some translation scholars have studied the Ivan King’s translation of Camel Xiangzi from the perspective of translation strategies, some scholars have analyzed Shi Xiaojing’s and Ivan King’s translations from the perspective of functional equivalence, and others have focused their study on the basis of adaption theory and pragmatic principles. However, there are not many studies of pragmatic features yet. This thesis chooses Lao She’s Camel Xiangzi and Shi Xiaojing’s translated version as the comparative corpus, and carries on analytical research on the pragmatic characteristics between Chinese and English.Topic has been a very important concept in contemporary linguistics, and also a hot topic at home and abroad for nearly half a century. The linguistic typology represented by Li and Thompson argue that Chinese is a topic-prominent language and English is a subject-prominent language. A topic is generally put forward at the beginning of a Chinese sentence, and a comment (the rest of the sentence) follows without using grammatical devices to maintain subject-predicate consistency; In English, the subject-predicate structure which is the main line of organizing a sentence occupies a dominant position, and other elements are interconnected around the main line to form an organic unity.Since the1970s, cohesion theory has always been the concern in linguistic and translation field. In Cohesion in English (1976), Halliday and Hasan classify cohesive devices into grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion:the former includes reference, substitution, ellipsis and conjunction; the latter includes reiteration and collocation. Many domestic and foreign experts have tried to establish the status of cohesion in discourse generation, and illustrated the importance of cohesion in discourse translation. The translators’ understanding of the similarities and difference of cohesive devices in the source language and target language will not only affect the understanding of the original text, but affect the quality of the translated text.Based on the theoretical framework of linguistics and translatology, especially from the pragmatic perspective, thesis will engage in contrastive study between Camel Xiangzi and its translated version, focusing on translation shift between topic-prominent and subject-prominent and the shift of cohesion in Chinese and English. This research will focus on analyzing the shift of cohesion in the translation process between Camel Xiangzi and its English version, and demonstrate the differences of reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion between the source text and the target text. The purpose of this thesis is to help get a further understanding of the impact of the pragmatic factors of Chinese and English on translation, and to provide some guidelines to the translator for Chinese-English translation practice.