Translation Of Paralanguage Between English And Chinese In Literary Works

In literary works, paralanguage can substitute characters' utterance and convey their emotional attitude. It can also make it easy to identify utterance meanings and deepen the understanding of characters' internal states and original works as well. Researches on paralanguage have become popular in recent years and tremendous achievements have been made in the field of intercultural communication together with language teaching and learning. However, the translation of paralanguage in written forms has not yet given much attention in literary works.Relevance Theory, which is a cross-disciplinary theory, provides us a new perspective for translation studies. Focusing on paralanguage in its narrow sense, this thesis aims at exploring a few general methods for the translation of paralanguage through analyzing a series of relevant characteristics of paralanguage and comparing its translated forms in literary works.Based on the Relevance Theory, the thesis analyzes their psychological motivation of using paralanguage by literary characters and draws such a conclusion that any forms of paralanguage used by them are the result and need of contextual relevance for the ultimate purpose of facilitating the communication and achieving expected contextual effects. Paralanguage does not represent semantic or propositional meaning in utterances under the most circumstances, but plays a pragmatic role to fill contextual vacancy.Translation can be regarded as an interlingual communication that is composed of two rounds of communications, during which the translator bridges the source writer and the target reader by acting as both the communicator and the audience. While translating paralanguage, a translator is supposed to make the intention of the source writer meet the expectation of the target reader. She/he should recognize the source writer's intention of using paralanguage, assess the cognitive environment and the expectation of the target reader, and finally express her/his interpretation of the source writer's intention in an appropriate translation resulting in achieving its pragmatic functions transplant in target text, which should not cost unnecessary processing effort.