A Pragmatic Study On The Translations Of Figures Of Speech In Lei Yu

Under the circumstance of advocating the translation of Chinese literature in our country, the author has noticed that drama which is of long history as well as significant cultural, literary and performing values takes a small proportion in the translation and dissemination of Chinese literature. But in China, drama, as a kind of special artistic form of language, is not only a literary genre, but also a kind of stage performance, which combines literariness with dramatic properties.Lei Yu, as a milestone work in the history of Chinese drama, has fascinating scenarios and a vivid description of many distinctive characters, which are more relevant to its hundreds of figures of speech. So researching on the figures of speech and their translations is significant to reflect the essence of the source text and disseminate local culture. But it’s really a big challenge to translate the figures of speech as they are of implied or suggested meanings with special forms, even culture-loaded expressions in many cases. In order to get “faithful in meaning and vivid in description” in translation, translators need to be proficient in two languages and respective cultures, and to analyze thoroughly with powerful and effective theories, just like pragmatics, to infer the writer’s intention, to take the target readers’ cognitive context and their reading responses into account, and to flexibly choose the translation strategies and methods.In addition, pragmatics is of strong explanatory power to some language phenomena. As translation also involves language use, communicative activity and cognitive domain like pragmatics, the application of pragmatics to translation is well-reasoned to be the hot issue in recent years. So in this thesis, the author makes research on the main figures of speech in Lei Yu and their translations with the advantages of Cooperative Principle, Politeness Principle and Relevance Theory in pragmatics, aiming to make some efforts on the translations of figures of speech in dramas by summarizing effective translation techniques and finding deficiencies in the English version translated by Wang Zuoliang and Barnes.