A Report On Translation Of Life Among The Savages

With the development of Pragmatics,scholars have continually applied this theory to explaining the communicative phenomenon of translation.Its basic theory,Speech Act Theory provides translators with possibility of comprehending the source text accurately.Life Among the Savages is a family memoir written by American novelist Shirley Jackson,in which the experience and funny stories of the author’s family were illustrated.Through humorous language,the character traits of personages in a novel,the emotional intention and the feeling reflected in the source language can be better improved,which is an essential part for literary works.All of these put forwards a requirement that,in the process of translating memoirs,the translator should analyze utterances with the guidance of Speech Act Theory and explore the more complex words meaning of the source text.The content of the memoirs,which is similar to real conversations,is designed in accordance with specific speech acts and intentions.The dialogues among the characters imply the speech acts while the monologue of authors is speech acts imposed on readers.Therefore,translators should analyze the source text logically to grasp the illocutionary force that reflects one’s emotion in the original and take advantage of translation skills and strategies to convey their illocutionary functions,eventually producing the same effect on the feelings or thoughts of the target readers.Further,the translator takes Life Among the Savages as the source text and makes an attempt to explore how to tackle the utterances in literary works from the lexical,syntactic and discourse levels.It is concluded that the illocutionary particles that involve illocutionary meaning should not be ignored;aiming at speech acts in the utterances,the translation skills and strategies can be appropriately applied,such as conversing,addition and free translation.Combining Speech Act Theory with literary translation is helpful to achieve the pragmatic equivalence between the source language and the target language,which is of great value to the research.Figure 0;Table 0;Reference 31...