On E-C Translation Of Dialogues In British Detective Fiction

Detective fiction catches the eyes of many readers and translators with its special charm. There is a tradition of writing detective fiction in the United Kingdom, and the most famous detective fictionists are Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie, while there is also a tradition of translating detective fiction in China, which can be traced back to the late Qing dynasty. The largest number of translation of British detective fiction is Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes series, followed by Agatha Christie's Miss Jane Marple and HerculePoirot series. As well as other fiction genres, dialogues are one of the most important ways to achieve the aim of verbal communication in detective fiction. Fictional dialogues are the communication of characters in the virtual world of literature, which are, if not exactly the same as, quite similar to those in the real world. All in all, dialogues are significant methods to shape characters and advance plots. Catherine Aird, one of the main representatives of the British modern detective fiction, wrote A Sloan and Crosby Mystery series that attract wide English readers because of the plot twists and wise words. This thesis aims to discuss the translation of dialogues in Past Tense from the perspective of conversational implicature theory and put forward related strategies.As for how to infer the implicature in the dialogues, firstly, this thesis classifies the dialogues into two groups: explicit dialogues and hidden dialogues. Explicit dialogues refer to all the oral dialogues and written dialogues between characters, while hidden dialogues are internal, including characters' self-cognition and views on external things, which are mainly reflected in characters' mental activity. In Past Tense, most of the dialogues are explicit dialogues, and sometimes explicit and implicit dialogues appear mixedly.Then the functions of the dialogues are sorted out, that is, introducing story background, creating suspense, shaping the image of detective and presenting detective skills, and revealing conflicts between characters. Finally, the corresponding translation strategies for the dialogues in Past Tense are presented in the light of conversational implicature theory from two perspectives: lexical and syntactic level. It proves that employing conversational implicature theory to the dialogue translation of British detective fiction helps to reproduce the implicature within the fiction,and will enhance the quality of detective fiction translation.