On The Translation Of Discourse Markers From The Pragmatic Perspective

Discourse is a kind of communication activity in social environment. While translation is an effective method that can examine the functions of discourse in social environment. This thesis discusses the translation of discourse markers from the language function combined with the translation practice perspective. Over the past few years, discourse markers (DMs for short) have become an intriguing object of linguistic study, and a great number of research articles and monographs have been published. Researchers have studied this linguistic phenomenon from various perspectives. DMs belong to a functional rather than lexical category. What’s more, DMs are small words of language but boast multiple pragmatic functions, i.e. textual and interpersonal functions. And they are also context-sensitive. Discourse markers usually do not have the original lexical meaning, thus when translating, the translators cannot simply translate their literal meaning and they must adopt some translation strategies to convey their implied meaning.This paper will touch on the studies of discourse markers that have drawn many scholars’attention, for DMs are widely used in daily communication. And a good command of DMs can facilitate coherence and understanding in the utterance. Following a review of studies on DMs, this paper will focus on the discourse markers in The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (1994) and its two Chinese translations by Yu Eryan (1993) and Zhao Xingguo&Zhao Ling (2012) respectively. Through the case study, the present author attempts to explore the pragmatic functions of five discourse markers, their translation, and then compare the two Chinese versions. Then the present author holds that the meaning of discourse markers lies in their communicative functions in the contexts, and the aim of the pragmatic translation is to achieve the functional equivalence, and at the same time, the yardstick for measuring the translation is examining the adequacy of discourse markers in target language environment.The Age of Innocence written by Edith Wharton was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and appealed to many literary critics engaged in interpreting her works from various perspectives. Chinese readers, however, are not familiar with this woman writer. At the same time, there is not much literature on the comparative study of discourse markers translation; thus the present author takes this as a method to study translation, and then assess the two Chinese versions. At last, the present author hopes this research could contribute to the further study on discourse markers translation.