A Study On The C-E Translation Of Character Utterances In Wei Cheng From The Perspective Of Pragmatic Translation

Wei Cheng, the only novel written by Ch ien Chun-shu, is well known all over the world for its uniqueartistic style. The novel successfully shapes a group of mentally-sick intellectuals, whose utterances are usuallyexquisite and full of conversational implicatures. In return, the utterances add more readability to the novel. Thetranslation of novels serves as a crucial part in literary translation. The character utterances, the essence of anovel, play an extremely important role in revealing the themes of life and portraying figures. So to speak, thetranslation quality of character utterances may affect that of the whole novel.Cooperative Principle and Politeness Principle, two important principles in pragmatics, have acomparatively strong explanatory power over the translation of character utterances, and they can guide thetranslator to better discover the implied meanings of the speakers. At the same time, they provide the translatorswith effective means of translation. While talking, people are supposed to abide by the two principles strictly toproceed with reasonable and effective communication, but sometimes they are violated to generate specialimplicatures. Therefore, the thesis, with relevance translation theory as the guiding theory, chooses Wei Chengand its English Version Fortress Besieged as the study text to analyze the translation of character utterancesviolating Cooperative Principle or Politeness Principle, aiming to discover the application of direct translationand indirect translation. The thesis further analyzes how to achieve the optimal relevance between the source textand the target text so that the translation can be fully understood and accepted by the target readers.This thesis is composed of six chapters. Chapter1is the introduction, including the background,significance and purpose of the study. A review of Wei Cheng and the guiding theories are presented in thefollowing chapter. Chapter3, theoretical framework, introduces the major principles, theories as well as thespecific translation strategies. Chapter4focuses on the research design, which involves the research questions,methods and the standards of collecting data. Chapter5is the core of the study. In this chapter, two translationstrategies, namely, direct translation and indirect translation, proposed by Gutt, are adopted to analyze thetranslation of character utterances. The last chapter draws a conclusion, and tries to effectively answer theresearch questions. Besides, the thesis also comes to some new findings.From the study, some conclusions have been drawn as follows. First, as to the translation of characterutterances in Wei Cheng, the translators adopted different strategies. For those communicative clues arising fromspecial sentence structures and words or phrases, on most occasions the translators adopted direct translation toemphasize the resemblance in linguistic properties. However, the translators adopted indirect translation tohandle those utterances that are hard for target readers to fully understand if directly translated. In this way the resemblance in cognitive effect is well reserved. However, no matter which strategy is employed, the optimalrelevance should be achieved between the English version and the source text so that the target readers may gainthe optimal contextual effect through minimum processing efforts. Thus they can better represent the beauty ofsource language, which is both sharp and humorous. Second, the two strategies of relevance translation theory,direct and indirect translation, play an important role in the translation of character utterances and they caneffectively guide the translation of character utterances.