On Pragmatic Strategies For Translating Quotations

Difficulties of translation originate from the heterogeneity of both language and culture. The major challenge facing translator is to overcome those linguistic as well as cultural differences in the translation process. In many cases, translators need to resort to the use of different translation strategies to complete the pragmatic purpose of the author of the source text.Quotations, known as a common writing skill, refer to the sentences or paragraphs quoted from other books or articles. Writers in their writings quote from the works of others for their own purposes, pragmatically. The process of choosing a proper quotation is the process of the writer fulfilling the intention of irony, persuasion and consistency. In our translation, it’s not enough to deliver the literal meaning of quotations. Translators shall overcome the cultural heterogeneity and replace the cultural elements with those from the target language. From the perspective of pragmatic theory, quotations contain all the information of the original text as well as the unique cultural elements and aesthetic function. Therefore, the target version should not only convey the basic information of the original text, but also reflect the pragmatic purpose of the author.The present paper is based on the translating practice of quotations in the book titled Food of Shakespeare—Early Modern Dietaries and the Plays. The first part of this paper reviews the pragmatic translation theory in terms of representatives, main ideas, masterpieces and definition while the second part being a summary of the current situation of pragmatic translation research.Pragmatics studies the meaning of language in concrete context. The pragmatic translation review is an equivalent translation theory. Some of the translators break the original writing style to emphasize the obedience of the readers’cultural background while others prefer to retain the essence to help the readers to open their horizon. From the point of the author, there is no need to be constrained in pursuing either equivalence. All the pragmatic purposes, social and cultural elements should be taken into consideration. In most cases, the number of quotations in a text is small and they scatter. And this well explains the neglect of quotations in the field of translation practice and related studies. During the process of collecting materials, the author of this paper found that scholars paid more attention to the translation of traditional Chinese quotations and the translating methods such as domestication and foreignization were ambiguous. The translation of English quotations is worth exploring. One outstanding feature of the book titled Food of Shakespeare—Early Modern Dietaries and the Plays is its numerous English quotations. The author quoted mainly from previous masterpieces, pharmacopoeia and famous plays of Shakespeare. The ancient English writings, different cultural background and the anther’s status and attitude had become the main obstacles of the work. When translating the book, the author of the present paper is often faced with the task of trying to make sense of different strategies. The pragmatic strategies for translating quotations are really worth the effort of translators.Inspired by the pragmatic translation theory, the author of this paper classifies functionally the quotations collected from the book and discusses the translation strategies for dealing with them in the third and fourth parts of this paper. The writer divided all the quotations into five categories based on the form and content. By analyzing the pragmatic purpose of the original article, the author summarized the three basic pragmatic purposes of English quotations and made full explanation. In the fourth part, the author proposed several proper translating strategies for different functions respectively. The author believes that the usage of quotations reflects their unique functions. For quotations with different pragmatic functions, translators should adapt translating strategies for achieving maximum pragmatic equivalence.