An Interactive Approach To Improve Translator's Discourse Transfer Ability

PACTE is founded in October 1997, it mainly engages in translation ability acquisition research and aims to promote the study of translation ability to gain and have a better understanding of translation ability. In 1998, PACTE proposed a translation ability mode and in which it includes six sub-abilities:discourse transfer ability, communicative ability in two languages, extra linguistic ability, professional instrumental ability, strategic ability and psycho-physiological ability (PACTE,2000; Beeby,2000). Discourse Transfer ability, according to PACTE, is the most important ability and the key ability to contact other abilities, it refers to an ability to complete transfer process from Source Text (ST) to target (TT), meanwhile it has taken the function of translation and characteristics of the receptors into account.The thesis targets to introduce an interactive approach to enhance translators' discourse transfer ability. Interactive approach refers to the interaction between translators and the ST as well as the TT; also it indicates the interaction between bottom-up process and top-down process. According to Zhang Jingyu and Ren Junfeng's manuscript in 2008, by practicing bottom-up process translators could work out the meaning of the words and structure of a sentence and build up a composite meaning for the sentence. At the same time,with predicting capability of top-down process and on the basis of the context plus the composite meaning of the sentences already processed, translators could know what next sentence is most likely to mean.Equipped with the interactive approach, translators could work out the most likely intended meaning of any equivocal word, sentence and discourse. Therefore they could have greater discourse transfer ability in representing to readers or receptors of the TT a whole word that the author of ST intended to in his or her work.The thesis begins with the analysis of linguistic-based and discourse-based translation theories. Based on these theories, the target text is a product of a translation process that achieving equivalence, functionality and other purpose and both linguistic and social functions of the ST should be reflected in the TT. And among the equivalence theories, the writer prefers to the one proposed by Nida, that is formal equivalence and dynamic equivalence. However, text-based translation theories sometimes may neglect the word-level meaning of the ST, so the thesis, by analyzing a story in a popular book Philosophical Stories; introducing a new approach of translation.