Pragmatic Equivalence In Deixis Translation As Exhibited In David Copperfield

Translation is a kind of cultural activity to convey the linguistic, cultural and stylisticmessage expressed in one language to another.(Nida,1993） Being such a kind ofcommunicative activity, its first and foremost aim is to convey appropriately the meaning ofthe original so that the target language readers can get a similar impact as the source languagereaders. Many researchers have studied deixis translation by using different methods indifferent themes or special context. The methods include analysis at the lexical level, syntacticstructure or textual reference, etc. Therefore, the present study tries to take a holistic study ofreasons in deixis translation. The data of this thesis are from the novel David Copperfield inwhich the abundant use of distal/proximal deixis is found.Deixis means “pointing”. As one of the basic subjects in pragmatics, it mainly studieshow to express the features in context by using different language forms and how tounderstand its referential meaning based on context. For the definition of discourse deixis,Levinson says “we may include in discourse deixis a number of other ways in which anutterance signals its relation to surrounding text”. In this sense, discourse deixis is verysimilar to cohesion proposed by M. A.K. Halliday. Deixis is clearly a form of referring that istied to the speaker’s context, with the most basic distinction between deictic expressionsbeing “near speaker” versus “away from speaker”. In English,“the near speaker” are ‘this’‘here’‘now’. The “away from speaker”, are ‘that’,‘there’‘then’.(Yule,1981). The presentthesis selects “this, these, that, those” to explain how pragmatic equivalence is achieved inboth the original and translated versions. In English and Chinese, the basic deictic senses ofthe proximal deixis “this”, and the distal deixis “that”, are “near” and “remote” from theperspective of the speaker. However in the actual communication, whether we choose theproximal deixis or distal dexis is not only based on the practical spatial and temporal distance,but also influenced by many factors.This thesis aims at answering two questions:(1) How do the translted Chinese proximal&distal deixis correspond to the English ones?(2) What are the main determiners of thenon-Equivalent uses in the translation of proximal&distal deixis from English to Chinese?Discourse deixis is most frequently used in classic literature and how well it is translated canin a sense reveal how faithfully the original thoughts and ideas of the source text are conveyed.Proximal/distal deixis is one critical part of discourse deixis and these words have their ownunique features in linguistic context. So we will analyze translation of these deictic words inthe main part of this paper.Based on the different features of English and Chinese proximal/distal deixis, the present thesis compares English terms with similar Chinese expressions, and then makes apragmatic analysis of its different types in English works and Chinese translations. Thecomparative analysis finds two kinds of modes in using distal/proximal deixis in English andChinese: equivalent use of distal/proximal deixis and non-equivalent use of distal/proximaldeixis (the use of English distal/proximal deixis not having corresponding Chinese deicticexpression). The non-equivalent use of deixis is further classified into two subtypes. One isthe use of distal/proximal deixis in English with no deictic expression in Chinese, the other isthe use of different deictic expressions in English and Chinese. Some typical examples arecited to illustrate the point for the choice of different linguistic expressions in Chinese forfurther discussion.This thesis proposes tentatively four determiners for the choice of different forms oftranslation on distal/proximal deixis from English into Chinese. Firstly, the use ofdistal/proximal deixis for linguistic difference in the two languages. It is perhaps helpful toconvey the original meaning in different lexical form or sentence structure; the second point ispsychological distance. The choice of deictic words can reveal speakers’ evaluation andattitude towards what they are talking about. The third is the influence of emotional factorsand social background for using different deictic expression. The last one is contextual factorwhich can always influence deictic expression form.