Comparative Studies Of Conversation Translation In Two Chinese Versions Of Emma——From The Perspective Of Cooperative Principle

Cooperative Principle (CP) was proposed by the American linguist Paul Grice and was an important linguistic theory. According to the Cooperative Principle, Speakers should comply with cooperative principle to make the conversation go smoothly. If the speaker violates the cooperative principle, the conversational implicature will occur. As the translation is a written communication process between original author and the translator, and between the translator and the translated-text readers, the Cooperative Principle also applies to translation process.Generally, each novel is composed of the characters and plot. And the character’s conversation is an effective way to strengthen the emotional exchanges and promote the development of the story. So characters’ conversation translation is very important. Making characters violate the Cooperative Principle is a way for the author to better depict the characters’inner world. The conversational implicature breaching of the Cooperative Principle can reflect character’s psychological state and emotional activities. The Cooperative Principle can help translators understand and translate the characters’conversation in a better way. When the translator translates the conversation of the novel, on one hand, he should use CP to understand the conversational implicature and exhibit it in the target text; on the other hand, he should take the four maxims as the translation norms to make sure his translation is accurate and smooth and conveys the equal information as the original text, and at the same time, he must avoid that the new and ambiguous conversational implicature occurs in the translated text.Emma was the comparatively mature and influential one of Jane Austen’s works. Since Emma has a very high literature value, there have emerged lots of Chinese translation versions and retranslation versions of Emma. Since the emergence of these translations, academic researches on these versions have never stopped. This paper does comparative research on two translated versions of Emma from the perspective of CP. The translation versions of Emma by two well-known Chinese translators Zhang Jinghao and Sun Zhili are famous in China, but their styles of translation are quite different from each other. By comparing the conversation translation of two Chinese versions of Emma, this paper intends to find out how CP helps translator understand the conversational implicature of the conversation of the original text of Emma and how to use CP to better translate the conversation. The author of this paper hopes that the discussion in the paper can provide some reference for conversation translation in the novel, and help to find better translation versions and translation method to make a small academic contribution to this area.