A Pragmatic Approach To Fictional Dialogue Translation

As one means of depicting characters, the dialogue in fiction is multifunctional and can be regarded as the most memorable part in fiction. Its translation is, as a matter of course worthy of great attention in fictional translation. But the studies on dialogue translation in fiction are rather few because of its notoriously complicated situation. Translation is a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural communicative activity. Its aim is to achieve the maximal equivalence in meaning. Pragmatics is a study of meaning of utterance in a specific situation. Therefore, meaning is the place where pragmatics comes into translation.This paper puts forward the pragmatic approach to dialogue translation, generally speaking, to make maximal application of pragmatic principles both in the understanding phase and the reproduction phase in order to achieve pragmatic equivalent effect in fictional dialogue translation.This thesis falls into eight chapters. Chapter One is a survey of the research scope of fictional dialogue including the nature and functions of fictional dialogue, in order to prove the prominence of fictional dialogue in fictional translation.Chapter Two deals with the necessity of the combination of pragmatics and translation.Chapter Three focuses on the application of pragmatics to fictionaldialogue translation.From Chapter Four to Chapter Eight, a systematical analysis is made to clarify the way the pragmatic approach to fictional dialogue translation is actually carried out through discussing the relationship between fictional dialogue translation with context, deixis, conversational implicature, politeness principle and relevance theory respectively.Finally, as the conclusion of this thesis, based on a general review of the current evaluation criteria of literary translation, a tentative proposal is made that the evaluation of a translated literary version depends on whether the optimal pragmatic equivalent effect is achieved or not.