An Analysis Of The Speech Act Of Sympathy And Its Realization In Translation

The expression of sympathy is universal in all languages, as one poet in ancient China once wrote, "Few live to a hundred years while their sorrow longer still appears". It is definitely true:life is a journey full of ups and downs in which we are bound to suffer a series of unfortunate things, such as falling ill, quarrelling with a best friend, failing in examinations, breaking up with lovers or passing away of a beloved elderly. In essence, sympathy is a polite and beneficial speech act which is often used in our daily life to express the speaker's pity and care for the hearer. On the basis of the Speech Act theory and the Politeness Principle (PP), this thesis aims to analyze the speech act of sympathy and its realization in translation. Since little research is found on the speech act of sympathy, this study has a certain value.Based on the parallel corpus of Hongloumeng, the thesis analyzes the characteristics, manifestations and different strategies of the speech act of sympathy and explores the influences of social parameters on them such as relative power and social distance. Finally, the study makes a comparison between the two versions of Hong Lou Meng on translation strategies. Speech act theory and PP are the theoretical foundations of this research.In order to achieve the study purposes, the author collects 86 examples of sympathetic expressions from Hong Lou Meng. According to the coding manual of Blum-Kulka's Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP), speech acts can also be basically segmented into the Head Act and the Supportive Move. Based on the approach, the study investigates the characteristics, manifestations and strategies of the speech act of sympathy and analyzes these speech acts from the aspects of social parameters. It also uses the Hongloumeng Parallel Corpus to compare the two translated versions of the sympathetic expressions by Yang Xianyi and David Hawkes.Sympathetic utterances are divided into two categories in this paper, namely direct sympathies and indirect sympathies. Through analyzing, the author summarizes the head act words of direct sympathies,3 kinds of structures and 6 sentence types of all the sympathetic utterances. Based on the general classification, all the sympathies belong to 9 sub-categories of strategies. Indirect sympathy strategies are far more used than direct ones, with the strategy of problem solving ranking first, followed by concern, reason, comfort, astonishment, criticism, forgiveness and empathy. The author also analyzes the influences of relative power and social distance on sympathy strategies. Finally, two versions of the speech act of sympathy are compared on the basis of parallel corpus.Generally speaking, both Yang and Hawkes have the overloaded translation or underloaded translation. Yang has a faithful attitude towards the source text and source culture when he translates some idioms or proverbs about sympathy. Hawkes is target-culture-oriented and takes target readers into consideration. Translation approaches differ from culture to culture and context to context. In general, Yang mainly applies translation strategy of foreignization and Hawkes prefers domestication. Correspondingly, Yang usually adopts literal translation while Hawkes applies liberal translation and annotation.From this study, we can better understand the relation between language and culture in Hong Lou Meng. Moreover, studying the speech act of sympathy in Hong Lou Meng may become a good supplementary material to the current study of speech act. By making a comparison between the two versions, the study of the speech act of sympathy in translation provides useful suggestions in future work of translation as well as strategies in cross-cultural communication.There are overall five chapters in this thesis. Chapter one introduces the origin, purposes and significance of the study. The organization of the whole thesis is also presented in this chapter. Chapter two makes a systematic survey on relevant studies at home and abroad, namely the Speech Act Theory, Politeness Principle, Face-Saving Theory and relevant studies on Hong Long Meng in recent years. The insightful significance and shortcomings of these studies are also discussed in order to form the concrete issues of the study. Chapter three elaborates the methodology used in this thesis. It illustrates the specific research questions, procedures of data collection and the ways we analyze the data. Chapter four answers research questions respectively. It presents the utterance characteristics, manifestations, communicative strategies, and states the relation between pragmatic strategies and social parameters. The last section in this chapter makes a comparative study of Yang's and Hawkes'translation in order to investigate their different translation strategies for the speech act of sympathy. Chapter five is the conclusion of this study, pointing out the major findings, implications, limitations and suggestions for future research.