The Pragmatic Enrichment In The English Translation Of Chinese Fiction

Pragmatic enrichment, a common phenomenon in the understanding of utterance, refers to the process where the addressee broadens or narrows the meaning of a word or a structure of an utterance in accordance with the context. In recent years, as an important part of lexical pragmatics, pragmatic enrichment has aroused great interests among many scholars and many findings have been obtained from the researches in this field. However, most of the earlier studies set out from an intra-lingual angle and ignore the utilization of pragmatic enrichment in translation---an inter-lingual communication, which can be seen as a limitation to the studies on pragmatic enrichment.Based upon the previous research, this thesis adopts the optimal relevance, ostensive-inferential communication and context in the Relevance Theory as the theoretical basis and conducts a systematic analysis on the pragmatic enrichment in the translation of Red Sorghum into English. It is pointed out that translation is a double ostensive-inferential communication process where the translator acts as a mediator. On one hand the translator has to infer from the ostensive information given by the source text author and understand his communication intention; on the other hand, the translator has to assess the cognitive environment, communication expectations of the target text readers before he generates the translated text, so that the optimal relevance between the translator and the target text readers can be achieved.Within a Relevance theoretical framework, and taking discourse analysis as the major research method, this thesis specifically analyses the translation of linguistic and cultural related utterances in Red Sorghum. When dealing with linguistic-related discourse, the translator mainly resorts to the narrowing as a linguistic device while he uses broadening as a cultural device in dealing with the cultural-related utterance. As a linguistic device, narrowing process will help the translator specify information in the linguistic context such as temporal indications and textual cohesion, so that the target text readers can obtain maximized context efforts and adequate relevance; as a cultural device, on the other side, broadening assists the translator to equivalently translate the historical, religious and social customs information in the cultural context, allowing the target text readers to obtain adequate relevance with justified cognition efforts and achieve the optimal relevance.It therefore can be found that, as a strategy, pragmatic enrichment exists in the process of translation which can be seen as an inter-lingual communication activity. When analyzing the translation of Red Sorghum, the author concludes that the translator resorts to different pragmatic enrichment strategy when dealing with varied contexts, which allows the target text readers to obtain adequate relevance without costing unjustified efforts and the achievement of optimal relevance. The outcomes of this research may provide a new research thought to the literary translation studies and will as well offer a new angle and approach for the going-global of Chinese literary and culture.