Salience Of Translators’ Meta-pragmatic Awareness In The Translation Of Inaugural Addresses

Verschueren proposes that pragmatics should constitute a general functional perspective on language. He points out that language use is essentially a choice-making process with the aim of generating meaning for communicative purposes. As a meaning generation process, the meaningful functioning of language involves language users’ mobilization of linguistic resources, which is manifested in various structural choices as a result of constant adaptation to contextual correlates of specific communicative event. Moreover, the status of language users’ mental processing is describe in terms of salience, which means choices are made with different degree of consciousness. In particular, meta-pragmatic awareness is deemed as a generating force behind language users’ linguistic choices in that language users know more or less what they are doing when using language and they reflect upon the choices, make negotiation and adaptation so as to satisfy their communicative needs.Translation, as a process of translator’s purposeful language use, necessarily involves linguistic adaptation of various kinds. Based on the framework of adaptation theory, this research takes translator’s meta-pragmatic awareness as the starting point with the aim of eliciting translation strategies from the angle of pragmatic adaptation. Translation activity demonstrate its own features of adaptability, which requires translators to make structural choices with contextual correlates of the original text with the guidance of meta-pragmatic awareness so as to lay a solid foundation for further negotiation, adaptation and adjustment in the target language. Therefore, identification of contextual elements becomes the difficult point for translators’ adaptation. As a speech event, American inaugural address is embedded in real-world human activity and the address can be viewed as a complex structural-contextual category. It has a relatively fixed frame of interpretation the dynamic meaning generation of the target text, which points out the direction for translators to make structural adaptation. By comparing different translation versions, the paper demonstrates how translators act on their initiative of meta-pragmatic awareness for grasping contextual correlates of adaptability with the aim of faithfully transferring both semantic and contextual meaning of the source text and maximizing the intended communicative effect.