A Comparative Analysis Of Dialogues In Three Chinese Translations Of Pride And Prejudice From The Perspective Of Pragmatics

Literature translation, using another language to convey the artistic conception of the original works, makes readers gain the same enlightenment, and feeling of aesthetics as in reading the translation. As an important part of literature translation, fiction translation draws many translators’ interest. Dialogues play a very important role in portraying the image and the personality of the characters in the fiction. So a better fiction translation mostly depends on a better translation of its dialogues. Pride and Prejudice is rich in personal dialogues and they have rich conversational implicature.Therefore, it deserves our efforts to do a research on the translation of fictional dialogues in this world well-known fiction.Pragmatics can be defined as the study of how utterances have meanings in situations. As an important component of pragmatics, the cooperative principle and politeness have better interpretation power for the analysis of fictional dialogues, so is the translation of fictional dialogues. In this thesis, representative dialogues are selected from Pride and Prejudice and three Chinese versions of these dialogues are compared and analyzed with the guideline of cooperative principle, politeness principle and the face theory in the hope of employing a new aspect to explore the fiction to make some possible contributions to fictional dialogue translation.On the basis of the cooperative principle, politeness principle and the face theory in pragmatics, this thesis pays more attention to the comparison and analysis of the conversational implicature of fictional dialogues between characters in translation. By comparing the original dialogues and the three Chinese translations, the thesis hopes to find out if the Chinese translations better convey the original author’s aim at depicting the personality of characters or achieve the effect of conversational implicature, making readers appreciate rich personality of characters, language power, witty humor or irony of the dialogues as the original ones.