Cross-Cultural Construction Of Interpersonal Meaning In Translation

Translation is a cross-cultural communication, with the author, translator and the reader in target culture as participants. In spite of the interactive nature of translation, interpersonal meaning of text, which is determined by the three interactive parties and related to the purpose of translation activity, has been ignored in traditional studies of translation, even in modern translation studies, there being no special and systematic study of interpersonal meaning of text. From abroad, the philological school of translation study is concerned for the faithfulness to the original; linguistic-oriented school is concerned for the equivalence and cultural studies turn to the external relations of translation with social and cultural phenomenon, none of which has reached the deep dimension of the interpersonal metafunction of language. The interpersonal function concerns the purpose of linguistic interaction and should be taken as the object of special and systematic research. Domestically, the academic attention to interpersonal meaning begins to be paid at the time of the introduction to the Systemic Functional Linguistics since 1980s, In the field of translation studies, some scholars have written essays on the subject of interpersonal meaning. They have found the problem of non-equivalence in translation, and discussed some reasons of the problem, but their discussions are restricted to particular aspects of interpersonal meaning construction without specialized and systematic elucidation, and they haven't proposed the concept of cross-cultural construction of interpersonal meaning.One of the major purposes of linguistic interaction is to establish and maintain a desirable interpersonal relationship. If the production and reading of the source text realizes interactive event between the author and the reader, the translation realizes a cross-cultural communication between the author of the source text and the target readers through the translator's endeavour, In this process, the translator plays a very complicated role. He can either function as the mediator between the author and the target readers, or work to realize his subjectivity or personal motivation through the...