Meaning: The Starting Point Of Modern Rhetoric And Translation Theories

Meaning is the key issue of philosophy of language and a hotly debated topic. For many years, scholars from different fields, such as philosophy, linguistics, psychology, logics and rhetoric have cast their eyes on meaning and have been trying to explain what meaning is. They have put forward quite a lot of meaning theories but none is satisfactory. People didn't focus on the meaning of language in use until the "linguistic turn" of philosophy in the 20th century. Richards, one of the pioneers of contemporary western rhetoric, redefines the meaning of words with the theory or philosophy of language. He claims that meaning is a function of interpretation and that words are symbols or signs, which require interpretation. Meaning does not reside in the words or signs themselves but needs to be interpreted in context. He points out the very nature of meaning: meaning is a function of interpretation in context. Philosophy of language contributes a lot to the theoretical construction of western rhetoric in the 20th century. Meaning theory is the starting point of the contemporary western rhetoric theory and also the joint of rhetoric and philosophy of language. The combination of rhetoric theory and speech act theory broadens research areas for rhetoric. Therefore, rhetoric has become a valuable interdisciplinary theory of language use and meaning in the 20th century.Meaning is also the key issue of translation theory. The soul of translating is transferring meaning between the source and target languages. Owing to the influence of structuralism, the traditional translation theory focuses only on the static language structure without paying any attention to the actual use of language, i.e., speech, in communication. Thus, it tried by no means to answer what meaning is. Translation theory is not the one to examine meaning, but the one to explore its transference. The problem hence arises that when meaning is not well defined, such an exploration goes more or less in a blind way. Under the guidance of this kind of theory, translation studies have fallen into a dilemma and the establishment of translatology has become an unrealizable dream.Translating is communicating; it follows the laws of communication as well. Translatology is the study of human communication, it can never do without communicative capacity, i.e.,...