Studies On Pragmatic Equivalence And Pragmatic Failure In Chinese-English Translation From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Language is the carrier of culture and the profound cultural background and implication embodied in classic literature has already been the bond for mutual understanding and communication between people from different cultural traditions. As an interlingual communicative activity, translation, literary translation in particular, involves not just inter-lingual transfer between two languages, but more often the transfer between different culture and thinking modes. Due to differences in culture and language between the East and the West, it is very likely for translators to cause the loss of specific contextual effect and cultural connotation in the translation, leading to the case of pragmatic failure in which readers in TT either misunderstand the ST or fail to gain the same aesthetic enjoyment as that appreciated by readers in ST. As a result, to successfully convey pragmatic meaning in ST and to let readers in TT enjoy contextual effect equivalent to that gained by readers in ST have become the key in realizing smooth communication between the original author and readers of the translation.This thesis, from the perspective of the Relevance Theory and the pragma-linguistic and socio-pragmatic equivalence angle, finds out through contrasting and analyzing specific examples in Chinese-English literary translation that the relevance is prerequisite for understanding pragmatic meaning in the original and also for achieving the equivalent effect between the ST and the TT, and that the reason for pragmatic failure can either be attributed to the loss of relevance, that is, readers in TT cannot find relevance that can help them infer the specific cultural implication in ST in their cognitive environment or to the discrepancy in contextual effect between Chinese and English, namely Chinese is paratactic language while English is hypotactic. To cross the barrier created by language and culture and ultimately achieve equivalent effect between ST and TT, first, the translator, as a reader of the ST, needs to identify the optimal relevance based on his or her encyclopedic knowledge and consideration of the logic semantic relations between sentences in ST and then, as a writer of TT, in order to reduce the unnecessary processing effort on readers’ part, the translator has to make proper adaptations to those linguistic symbols or particular contents that may hinder readers in TT from finding out the optimal relevance in their encyclopedic knowledge and cognitive environment. Only in these ways, can the equivalent effect be achieved in TT at various levels.