Application Of Pragmatic Approaches To Translation

The world is carried out through communications. And communications cannot work without language and translating. The significant effects that translation has produced on people's lives and international communications could hardly be neglected. Pragmatics is about the use of language. It applies factors, such as, context, culture, cross culture and discourse to interpret implied meanings of utterances. This thesis explores translation theories and practice from a new perspective---pragmatics. It consists of six chapters.Chapter One---Introduction, which introduces significant translation theories put forward by Eugene A. Nida and Peter Newmark, important theories in pragmatics and development of pragmatic translation. Chapter Two---Speech Act Theory and Translation, is mainly based upon J. Austin's Speech Act Theory and Searle's Illocutionary Act. Chapter Three employs Grice's "Co-operative Principle" and advocates and translation should cover the features of adequacy, accuracy, closeness and acceptability. Chapter Four is on "Politeness Principle" of Leech, saying that cultural context and context of situation should be taken into consideration. Chapter Five---Relevance Theory and Translation, introduces cognitive context, relevance and Optimal Relevance, and proposes that translation is to seek Optimal Relevance under the guidance of Relevance Theory. Chapter Six concludes the whole thesis from three aspects: summary, findings and limitation.This thesis based on pragmatic theories and approaches, analyzes the application of pragmatic approaches to translation. Pragmatic translation, being a dynamic study from various directions and perspectives, is a new approach to enhance and improve translation theories.