On English Translation Of Scenic Spots' Names In Classical Suzhou Gardens

Scenic spots'names play a very important role in generalizing and highlighting the most striking features of scenic spots themselves and therefore provoke picturesque images in tourists'mind. Properly translated English versions of scenic spots'names would inspire the tourists with a holistic clear picture of vision, and stimulate their desire to pay a visit. This thesis is to discuss the English translation of scenic spots'names in classical Suzhou gardens through application of pragmatic translation strategy, which has remained an almost unexplored field up till now and deserves more attention to be paid to it.Pragmatics, by definition, is the study of language use. Pragmatic translation examines how a translator is able to figure out more than what is said in the structure of language. The pragmatic adequacy in translation aims at translating implicatures in full, taking full account of differences between the target language and source language in both pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic dimensions.Scenic spots'names are traditionally viewed to be static and isolated. This thesis endows them with a different significance from a completely new perspective and regards them as an inseparable part of a dynamic process of pragmatic communication. This perspective provides a new and reasonable account for the pragmatic mechanism involved in proper name translation.Then, based on the pragmatic approaches to translation and a discussion on the formation and characteristics of scenic spots'names, the thesis moves on to explore the affecting factors and difficulties in achieving pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic adequacy respectively. In order to overcome the difficulties and with those affecting factors in mind, it summarizes two main translation orientations and several useful methods for achieving pragmatic adequacy in specific name translation.Finally, the thesis comes to the conclusion that in practice, these methods and techniques are usually interlaced with each other and the strategy translators adopt is always an integrated one. Moreover, discussion in this thesis does not suggest that the pragmatic approach to translation should be expected to be adopted as the only way in the process of reproducing the original message. However, it does have a place in translation studies and may serve as a provoking starting point for further researches.