An Empirical Contrastive Approach To The Translation Of English And Chinese Demonstratives

Deixis means "pointing", which is borrowed from Greek. As one of the basic subjects in pragmatics, it mainly studies how to express the features in context by using different language forms and how to understand discourse based on context. Deixis is a common feature of demonstratives in human languages. In English and Chinese, the basic deictic senses of the proximal demonstratives "this","这" and the distal demonstratives "that","那" are "near" and "remote" from the perspective of the speaker. But in the actual speech communication, whether we choose the proximal demonstratives or the distal demonstratives is not only based on the practical spatial and temporal distance, but also influenced by many factors. There is a great difference between English demonstratives and Chinese demonstratives.Many scholars both at home and abroad make a great contribution to the study of demonstratives and the comparative study of English and Chinese demonstratives. This thesis mainly focuses on the empirical study based on the bi-directionally translational equivalent data to analyze the differences between "this/that" and“这/那”.Firstly, the thesis reviews the previous study. Then with the help of Microsoft Word, we find these two pairs from four English and Chinese novels American Pastoral, The Old Man and the Sea, Fortress Besieged and To Live, and we can find the differences between the translation of English and Chinese demonstratives in their Chinese and English versions. Meanwhile, the study analyzes "this","that",“这”,“那”and their translations in terms of space proximity, time proximity and textual reference with many tables. We can find that the translation nonequivalence is obvious in terms of textual reference. Finally, it attempts to analyze the factors affecting the differences of English and Chinese demonstratives, such as psychological factors, situational factors, language system factors and the neutral demonstratives in English.We get some major findings from the empirical contrastive analysis of "this","that",“这”,“那”and their translations:(1) the frequency of the use of“这” and "that" is higher than that of“那”and "this";(2) in the process of translation,"this"/"that" and“这”,／“那”are not equivalent."This" can be not only translated into "这" but also translated into“那”while "that" can be not only translated into "那" but also translated into"这". The ratio of "这" translated into "that" is higher while the ratio of“那”translated into "this" is lower, and the ratio of "this" translated into“那”is lower while the ratio of "that" translated into "这" is higher;(3) when English and Chinese demonstratives are used as textual reference, the translation nonequivalence is obvious;(4) psychological factors not only influence Chinese demonstratives but also English demonstratives.The differences between English and Chinese demonstratives result in the difficulty of the translation between English and Chinese. In order to achieve a good result of translation, we should take all the factors into consideration, such as language itself, the culture, the customs and way of thinking. In most cases, the translations of English and Chinese demonstratives are equivalent, that is to say,"this" is translated into“这”while "that" is translated into "那";"这" is translated into "this" while“那”is translated into "that". However, their translations are not equivalent in some cases. This study will help us find the corresponding translation strategies in the process of translation. Furthermore, it will make a contribution to the acquisition of English and Chinese as a second language or a foreign language.