Significance Of Presupposition For Translation

The relationship between presupposition and translation was first issued and discussed by Peter Fawcett in his paper Presupposition and Translation, which gives an introduction to the definition, formation, categorization and features of presupposition, and talks about what role presupposition plays in translation. However, the research home and abroad in this proposition is far from adequate. Research done just raised the proposition of the significance of presupposition for translation, but did not give in-depth illumination or approaches to solutions.So, this paper mainly tries to make exploration on the significance of presupposition for translation in depth, on the basis of the above-mentioned limited theoretical information. According to ideal translation, all presuppositions have to be preserved in the translation, and actually most of the presuppositions can be preserved, but some cannot be reproduced because of linguistic and cultural differences. This paper focuses on approaches to handling of presuppositions in the original and its reproduction in the translation when presuppositions cannot be preserved completely because of linguistic and cultural differences. Examples are given regarding the three main approaches: omission, annotating and rewriting. Omission is usually applied when the presupposition is not shared by the target reader and the original writer. It, if not the case, is applied in situations that have lower requirement for cultural reproduction. Annotating, inner or external, is applied while presuppositions cannot be shared or grasped by context or other linguistic factors. It explains the presupposition to the target audience. But annotating is not adequate enough for literature translation because it breaks the fluency of reading with interruptions now and then. Rewriting is of special significance in the reproduction of linguistic and cultural presuppositions when there is nocorresponding counterpart in the target language or culture for the presupposition of the original, and the target audience has no access to it. The translator has to replace it with what can be found in the target language and culture to convey to the target audience.To sum up, reproduction of presupposition helps bring the original to the target reader, and successful reproduction of presuppositions is of great significance to translation.