A Pragmatic Analysis And Translation Of Demonstratives In David Copperfield

This thesis is an interdisciplinary study of pragmatics and translation. Pragmaticsstudies the actual use of language in a specific context or situation while translation, as aprocess of transferring both the meaning and cultural message between two texts, also treatslanguage as the specimen for study. Pragmatics assists the translator to understand theintended meaning in the original text and provides a new dimension for translation studies.Translation is a communicative process and cross-cultural practice. The language-orientedsimilarity makes it possible for the integration of the two disciplines.In the eyes of many people, demonstratives are no more than kid’s play. However, theseeming simplicity of demonstratives may always hide the complexity of them.Demonstratives, as deictic expressions, refer to the distance in space, time and discourse.They integrate textual information with contextual information, introducing, maintainingand shifting certain time, space and person. And they can even imply the speaker’s attitude.Demonstratives have been studied from the perspectives of philosophy, discourseanalysis, cognitive linguistics and pragmatics. These studies have provided a considerablydetailed description of demonstratives, but the studies on the translation of demonstrativesare far from enough by now. Inspired by the flourishing research going on abroad, Chinesescholars have also embarked on their way to studying demonstratives within the Chineselanguage. However, the studies on demonstratives in English by Chinese scholars arerelatively backward, let alone the translation of them in this regard.The author attempts to make a pragmatic analysis of a few distinctive Englishdemonstratives and explore the translation of them. On the list of selected demonstrativesare demonstrative pronouns/adjectives “this/that”,“these/those” and demonstrative adverbs“here/there”. Most studies of demonstratives are theoretical, not being put in the setting ofliterary works. To bridge the gap between abstract theory and concrete settings of language,the author selects the data of the thesis mainly from David Copperfield by Charles Dicksonand Zhang Guruo’s Chinese translation version. An extensive contrastive study of theEnglish demonstratives in David Copperfield and their Chinese versions by Zhang Guruo ismade both quantitatively and qualitatively.This thesis systematically analyzes demonstrative uses from a pragmatic perspectiveand explores thoroughly and exhaustively the translation strategies of them in the literaryworks. Eight categories of demonstrative uses are exemplified, including gestural use,symbolic use, transposed use, discourse deictic use, anaphoric use, cataphoric use, empathetic use and recognitional use.The interpretation of gestural demonstratives relies on the paralanguage. The referentof symbolic demonstratives can be made clear with the factors of a set time, place or aninterlocutor, etc. Transposed demonstratives are detached from an actual space andtransposed into an imagined situation. Discourse deictic demonstratives indicate the specificlinguistic segments in the discourse. Anaphoric demonstratives refer back to the antecedentsmentioned in the preceding part while cataphoric demonstratives are co-referential with theupcoming referents in the following part. Empathetic use of the demonstratives violates theconventional rule with the distal demonstratives referring to some physically near locationsand the proximal ones referring to other physically far places. Recognitional demonstrativesidentify the referent by the shared knowledge. No demonstratives are confined to onecategory of use. More than one use of the same demonstrative can be simultaneouslyobserved.When one translates demonstratives in a literary work, he should pay attention to theintended meaning of the original text, recognize demonstrative uses in the context andchoose the appropriate expressions with the same cultural, linguistic function to achieveequivalence in the target text. The process of translation is one of making choices amongdifferent translation strategies.To the author’s observation, Zhang Guruo mainly adopts the following strategies totranslate demonstratives in David Copperfield:1) formal correspondence,2) formalopposite transformation and3) functional adaptation. From the data analysis, the authorconcludes that formal correspondence is his first choice, functional adaptation the secondand formal opposite transformation the last.Due to the similar semantic features, the demonstratives “this/that”,“these/those” and“here/there” formally correspond with Chinese demonstratives in the most translations.However, differences between them do exist in some syntactic, semantic and pragmaticfunctions. For instance, the occurrence of “that” is higher than “this” in anaphoric use. Onthe contrary, the occurrence of the Chinese demonstrative “zhe”(这) is higher than “na”(那)in anaphoric use. In such cases, formal opposite transformation is necessary. More than that,psychological distance is the decisive factor in Chinese demonstratives. Different ways ofthinking and shift of perspective can also cause formal opposite transformation.The translator resorts to functional adaptation if he finds that formal correspondence orformal opposite transformation may result in ambiguity or awkwardness. Some methods of functional adaptation are suggested in the thesis, i.e. addition, omission, repetition, indexicalreplacement, context-specific equivalents. Different grammars require necessary addition.The personal-demonstrative dual reference is a unique Chinese phenomenon, oftenaccompanied with subjective attitude. Addition connects relevant information. As English isbasically hypotactic and Chinese has the tradition of being paratactic, the two languageshave different preferences for using the demonstratives. The frequency of demonstratives inEnglish is much higher than that in Chinese. Omission is often used in English-Chinesetranslation. It achieves conciseness and compactness. Repetition doesn’t mean redundancy.It is used in the translation of demonstratives when they have nothing to do with location.Repetition meets the rhetoric needs or highlights some important information. Indexicalreplacement, target language reader-oriented and in line with the linguistic habit of thetarget language, is essential for minimizing the foreignness and achieving authenticity. Thereal meaning of demonstratives can only be determined in the context. For that reason, thetranslator needs some specific equivalents to make the translation coherent and fluent.Furthermore, some English idioms of demonstratives should be flexibly translated.