Translation Of Hamlet In The Light Of Cooperative Principle And Pragmatic Equivalence

The marriage of translation and other disciplines is not a brand-new idea. In fact, the nature of translation calls for such interdisciplinary cooperation in broadening the vision of translation studies. This paper studies the application of pragmatic principles, especially Grice's Conversational Implicature Theory and Cooperative Principle, to the whole process of translation, including translation objective, translation strategies as well as translation quality assessment, etc. to draw due attention to the pragmatic aspects of translation.Cooperation is a prevailing awareness in successful communication, whether orally or literally. When it comes to inter-lingual and cross-cultural communication, the cooperation relationship becomes even more complicated because of the intervention of the bi-lingual, or rather, bi-cultural translator. Therefore, to ensure the fulfillment of the translation objective of meaning conveyance and effective communication, it is crucial for the parties involved to observe certain rules and regulations, that is, Grice's CP and its concrete Four Maxims, whose denotation and connotation are to be enlarged and enriched in the examination of translation.Cooperation awareness is also indispensable to pragmatic inference, which in turn is an essential step leading to the recognition of implicature. Implicature in Grice's theory bears many similarities with the"connotation","deep-structured meaning"or"implied meaning"from different angles. With the help of re-interpreted CP and Four Maxims in translation perspective, the translator is in a position to tackle some obsessing dilemmas by determining the proper meaning to be conveyed with a view to achieving pragmatic equivalence proposed in this paper. To put forward pragmatic equivalence as both a translation objective and a quality assessment criterion is to promote and also to facilitate the application of pragmatic principles to translation, whose success depends on the target reader's comprehension and appreciation to a considerable extent.To evaluate the authenticity and applicability of the above-mentioned principles, this paper discusses examples selected from Shakespeare's masterpiece—Hamlet. In consideration of the distinctive conversational implicature and rhetorical features involved in Hamlet, it stands to good reason to regard it as a touchstone for the CP and pragmatic equivalence in translation practice, which is supposed to take into account a wide range of factors, involving context, cultural elements, stylistics and aesthetics, to name just a few.Moreover, other animatedly discussed topics are also touched upon in this paper, for instance, cohesion and coherence, over-translation and under-translation, social and cultural concerns, presupposition and larger context, perlocutionary force, pragmatic addition, pragmatic omission, pragmatic obscurity and pragmatic inference, etc. All these factors have their own positions in the theoretical foundation and make their own contributions to the achievement of inter-lingual and cross-cultural communication regarded as the ultimate goal of translation in this paper, which is hoped by the author to serve as a catalyst to further theoretical studies.