The Translation Report Of The Essay A Shepherd's Life From The Perspective Of Pragmatic Enrichment

Essay,as a literary genre different from other literary genres,is characterized by its own unique features--short in length,bright in rhythm,and spiritually joyful in reading.This uniqueness of essay determines the necessity of grasping the charm and spirit of the original text in essay translation.In the process of translating essays difference of languages may create the phenomenon of information and context gap,which in turn leads to losses in semantic completion,logical words,clarifying meaning,aesthetic sensation,etc.Thus,one significant factor that determines the quality of translation is how to enrich such gaps and make it rich in content and easy to understand.Under this perspective,pragmatic enrichment is particularly pertinent to translation of essays.A Shepherd's Life(1910),one of the famous rural literary works written by William Henry Hudson who was titled as an author,naturalist,and ornithologist,helped foster the back-to-nature movement of the 1920s and 1930s.This book,rich in information gap and context obscurity,tells the story of a shepherd,Caleb Bawcombe,describing life in the south-central English county of Wiltshire before the turn of the 20th century.The translation of the book involves pronouns with ambiguous reference,pragmatic usage of proper words and quantity words,reconstruction of long and complex sentences with much effort to understand and other application of pragmatic enrichment like additional onomatopoetic words and entertaining elements.Thus,attempting to translate this novel,or part of it,into English presents a tough but rewarding challenge,as well as a pertinent platform for research on the application of pragmatic enrichment theory.Pragmatic enrichment attracts considerable interests from the perspective of translation,mostly on legal and commercial translation.This report attempts to explore the theory from a new genre--essay,and discuss how to apply pragmatic narrowing,pragmatic broadening and how to employ syntactic reconstruction and semantic compensation for the purpose of reproducing the effect of the source text.Drawing upon some carefully chosen examples collected in the process of completing the translation practice project,this report reaches a tentative conclusion that pragmatic enrichment should be employed on both lexical and syntactical levels on the basis of fully understanding of the source text when necessary.