A Contrastive Study Of English Versions Of Sanguo Yanyi In The Perspective Of Pragmatic Markedness Equivalence Principle

The title for this thesis is A Contrastive Study of English Versions of Sanguo Yanyi in theperspective of Pragmatic Markedness Equivalence Principle, which derivates from the“Functional Equivalence Theory” proposed by Eugene Nida. In fact, such theories and tacticscan be availed in quite a number of analytic issues concerning pragmatics. The so-calledEquivalent Translation inspired many scholars, and Dr. Houguojin is among them. Dr. Houstarted the idea of “Pragmatic Markedness”, later furthered into the pragmatic markednesshypothesis, which is of great availability in analyzing versions of translation. This veryapproach can be of help when systematic and relatively objective analysis is required.The thesis, in the perspective of the said hypothesis, gives an attemptive contrastivestudy on two famous versions of translation of renowned Chinese history novel, Sanguo Yanyi.The corpus collected in this thesis comes from two sources, one was translated by theCanadian, Zhang Yiwen in1972, with the name Romance of The Three Kingdoms, and theother one was translated by Moss Roberts, with the name Three Kingdoms, both translationsare famous excerpts, containing the contents from Chapter43to Chapter50. There is alsoanother obvious reason the author chose these8chapters to translate except that these8chapters describes the most enticing theme, the Chibi Campaign (Red Cliff Campaign), inwhich a lot of well-known plots like Borrowing Arrows by Boats, Huangrong Road,Kongming Borrowing East Wind and so on.In the thesis, the author attempts to make a contrastive analysis in two major aspects andother five sub-level aspects. Six chapters are included in the thesis. The first chapter is theintroduction. The second chapter gives out a brief introduction to markedness theory andpragmatic markedness hypothesis. Chapter3demonstrates the pragmatic markedness in twoversions concerning wording aspects. Chapter4describes the embodiment of pragmaticmarkedness in terms of figure speech, vagueness, and discourse structure. Chapter5tries togive out an attemptive suggestion to the technicality and feasibility of pragmatic markednessequivalence numerical model (NEV for PMEP). The ending chapter draws the conclusion. The author in the thesis mainly focus on the practical availability of pragmaticmarkedness equivalence principle in the two versions of translation, and tries to evaluate thisnew approach in evaluating translation.