A Study On Yang Xianyi And Gladys Yang’s Translation Of Call To Arms From The Perspective Of Meaning Theory In Socio-semiotics

Nahan is one of the most renowned representative works of the writerLu Xun and occupies an important position in modern Chinese literature. Itis acclaimed as an epoch-making masterpiece and a milestone in thedevelopment of Chinese literature. With the increasing internationalcultural exchanges, it has become a prevailing trend to translate Chineseclassical works into English. The translation of Nahan has a deep and far—reaching influence in spreading the Chinese culture, but the culturalinformation in this masterpiece is so abundant that it poses great challengesto translators. Hence, intensive and careful study is needed.Developed from linguistics and semiotics, socio-semiotic approach totranslation lays great emphasis on two bases of language signs, namely,meanings and functions. The three semiotic meanings concluded by Morrisrespectively are referential meaning, linguistic meaning, and pragmaticmeaning. Meanwhile, the six functions proposed by Newmark are dividedinto: informative function, expressive function, aesthetic function, phaticfunction, vocative function, and meta-lingual function. The socio-semiotictheory insists that translation is actually translating meaning, and thatmeaning and function are two indispensable aspects of language.Accordingly, the translation works should comply with the translationcriterion:“correspondence in meaning, similarity in function”.Based on socio-semiotic approach to translation, the criterion"correspondence in meaning and similarity in function" is adopted by thethesis to make a Chinese-English contrastive analysis of examples in Nahanand Call to Arms. The analytical section gives evidence of the practicalgains and loss in transfer of referential, linguistic, pragmatic meanings andcorresponding linguistic functions of the original text in literary translation.Besides, translation strategies commonly used by the translators areconcluded.To sum up, the meaning theory in socio-semiotics emphasizes that notonly linguistic signs but also non-linguistic signs helps to bring about theformation of textual meaning and influence the whole translation process.To a large extent, the socio-semiotic theory regards language as semioticand emphasizes meanings and functions of language. This approach liberates translation from the limitation of subjective “equivalence” andoffers us a relatively comprehensive and objective standard in translationstudies. Therefore, it is of instrumental significance in guiding translationpractice of contemporary Chinese literary classical works and casts somelight on later studies on literary translation and evaluation.