On The Translation Of Sociosemiotic Meanings

As a new discipline that evolves from semiotics, sociosemiotics is to study the relationship between sign systems and society in addition to human beings in the social context, thus providing a comprehensive and practical theoretical framework for translation studies. According to the theory of sociosemiotics, translation is translating meaning; the meaning of linguistic signs can be classified into three categories:referential meaning, intralingual meaning and pragmatic meaning. Meanwhile, every linguistic sign performs certain function. Peter Newmark divides the function of language into six types:expressive function, informative function, vocative function, aesthetic function, phatic function and metalingual function. The sociosemiotic approach to translation advocates that the translation should achieve "correspondence in meaning and similarity in function" with the source text. The theory of functional equivalence advanced by Eugene A. Nida emphasizes "the response of the receptor", which points out that "the closet natural equivalent translation is the one that can evoke from its target readers the same response as the source text can from its readers"Employing the sociosemiotic model of meanings as the framework, this thesis endeavors to compare and contrast the transference of referential meaning, intralingual meaning and pragmatic meaning in the two Chinese translations of Pride and Prejudice, with the purpose to prove the theoretical value of sociosemiotics in guiding the translation of literary works and to come up with some reference for further translation practice and criticism.This thesis is divided into six chapters. The first chapter briefly introduces the theory of sociosemiotics and Nida’s functional equivalence. The second, third and fourth chapters based on the sociosemiotic model of meanings explores translation problems respectively. The fifth chapter goes to details in comparing and contrasting the transference of three sociosemiotic meanings in the two Chinese translations (by Wang Keyi and by Sun Zhili) of Pride and Prejudice with the guidance of functional equivalence. The sixth chapter concludes that through an objective and holistic contrast of the two Chinese versions, Sun’s version excels Wang’s in terms of correspondence in meaning and similarity in function.