An Analysis Of Pragmatic Equivalence In Dramatic Dialogue Translation From The Perspective Of Cooperative Principle

Drama is a variety of comprehensive art form which can bring audience the aesthetic feeling both in visual and acoustic aspects. The dualistic nature of drama including readability and performability has made its translation list as one of the most difficult and problematic areas in the field of translation. Either out of its readability or performability, dialogues between different characters should be taken as the main linguistic form when studying drama translation. This thesis attempts to conduct a research on the pragmatic equivalence in dramatic dialogue translation from the perspective of Cooperative Principle.Pragmatic theories like Grice’s Cooperative Principle and conversational implicature are mainly used to analyze real life conversations, but are not often applied to the study of literary works including drama. Through introducing CP and conversational implicature to drama translation study, the author of this thesis aims to adopt a relatively new perspective to broaden the field of drama translation studies. According to Grice, the participants of a conversation are assumed to follow CP and its four maxims to fulfill effective communicative task, however, conversational implicature will be generated to achieve a certain communicative purpose if one of the four maxims of CP is flouted intentionally. Translation can also be viewed as a process of communication, in which CP has not only played an indispensable part in the translator’s understanding of the original work, but also contributed to a better reproduction of the original text to target text readers. Thus, applying CP to drama translation can help the translator realize the conversational implicature in the source text, and further achieve pragmatic equivalence including pragmalinguistic equivalence and sociopragmatic equivalence in the target text.In this thesis, the author makes inference of the conversational implicature in some typical examples of Cao Yu’s Lei Yu and its translated version-Wang Zuoliang’s Thunderstorm under the guidance of Cooperative Principle and its four maxims. Furthermore, through analyzing the realization of pragmatic equivalence in the translated version Thunderstorm in terms of pragmalinguistic equivalence and sociopragmatic equivalence, the author concludes that literal translation, liberal translation and adaptation can be adopted to achieve pragmatic equivalence.