A Genre-analytic Approach To Pragmatic Translation

Pragmatic texts, as functional texts for daily communication, tend to have theirown text conventions. Once translated into another language, a pragmatic textbecomes a member of texts belonging to the same genre in the target language and issubject to genre conventions in the target language. However, genre is a culturalproduct, which raises a problem for pragmatic translation. Translations producedunder the traditional principle of faithfulness don t conform to the text conventionsthe target culture has for the same genre, thus jeopardizing its communicative effect.Therefore, it s important to study the conventions of parallel texts in the targetlanguage in pragmatic translation. That s exactly genre analysis is dealing with: therelationship among structure, content and communicative purpose, so this theory canshed new light on pragmatic translation.According to Halliday and Hasan, language in use has two contexts: culturalcontext and situational context, which correspond to the schematic structure andrealizational patterns in genre analysis theory. As pragmatic texts are wide ranging,it s impossible to analyze all of them. In this study, cover letter is chosen as the mainobject. Two groups of parallel texts including10English cover letters and10Chinesecover letters are chosen for genre analysis. Similarities and differences in terms ofschematic structure and realizational patterns are analyzed under the theoreticalframework of ESP School and Australian Systemic-functional School of genre theoryrespectively. Based on the research results, the author believes that faithfulness tothe structure and content of the source text should give way to transformation ofschematic structure and realizational patterns of the source text to conform to thegenre conventions of cover letters in the target culture so as to fulfill thecommunicative purpose. Apart from analyzing cover letters, the author also appliesgenre analysis to several groups of other pragmatic texts, which are parallel texts to each other to explore how to make use of parallel text analysis to produce translationsthat conform to genre conventions of the target language.