A Study On Dialogue Translation Of Two Chinese Versions Of A Farewell To Arms From Pragmatic Perspective

This thesis aims at studying the translation of fictional dialogue and analyzing the dialogue translation in Lin Yijin's and Tang Yongkuan's Chinese versions of A Farewell to Arms from pragmatic perspective.Dialogue is an important component of fiction and plays a role to delineate the characters and promote the plot development. In A Farewell to Arms, dialogue between the characters occupies three quarters of the whole textual space. Despite the significance of fictional dialogue, its translation has not been endowed with enough attention. Though it is an imitation of daily conversation and elaborately arranged by the author, fictional dialogue is still governed by pragmatic principles. This thesis discusses about the translation of fictional dialogue from pragmatic perspective, and formulates a pragmatic approach to it, in which the translator is expected to make the most of relevant pragmatic knowledge to get a full understanding of the meaning of the source dialogue, grasp its implied meaning and reproduce an accurate one in the target language in accordance with the principle of pragmatic equivalence by means of translation crafts.Under the guide of pragmatic approach to fictional dialogue translation, this thesis analyzes and compares the examples of dialogue translation selected from Lin's and Tang's Chinese versions of A farewell to arms, points out the merits and demerits of each version and verifies the feasibility and maneuverability of pragmatic approach to fictional dialogue translation, in the hope of gaining more attention to fictional dialogue translation studies.