Pragmatic Enrichment In E-C Essay Translation

Essay is a literary genre as important as poetry, fiction and drama, and itstranslation is an integral part of the contemporary literary translation field. Fortranslators in essay translation, aesthetic comprehension and context reconstructionability is required. That is to say, the essay translation is based on the understandingof the original text and involves a process of transforming, improving and enrichingthe source text, which is worth deep exploration.The concept of Pragmatic Enrichment emerges from Lexical Pragmatics,which aims at constructing a particular contextual assumption based on thecontextual gap between the linguistically-specified meaning and the pragmaticcommunicated meaning at lexical, structural, or discourse level. In translation studies,pragmatic enrichment refers to a process during which translators, based on thecontext, enrich various information gap so as to achieve a better understandingbetween communicators. Nowadays, it has attracted more and more attention, nomatter as a method or a perspective for translation studies. However, theseresearches are restricted to lexical words and legal texts.This thesis aims at analyzing the pragmatic enrichment in E-C essay translationwith Tsi-an Hsia’s A Collection of American Essays as illustration, in order to probeinto essay translation from a new perspective and to explore the regularities for theapplication of pragmatic enrichment in essay translation. This thesis intends torespond to the following two questions:(1) What major types of pragmaticenrichment can be found in the Chinese translations compared with the respectivesource texts in Hsia’s A Collection of American Essays?(2) What regularities can bedetected in the use of pragmatic enrichment in essay translation on the basis of theabove findings? And there are two major findings:Firstly, Hsia employs various forms of pragmatic enrichment in histranslations that creates a similar receptor’s response in the target readers. At thesame time, it reflects the feasibility and the value of pragmatic enrichment in essaytranslation practice. Conducted by the methods of descriptive translation studies, thisthesis makes a comprehensive analysis on the pragmatic enrichment in Hsia’stranslation and finds that pragmatic enrichment is applied into three spheres, namelypragmatic enrichment at the lexical level, pragmatic enrichment at the syntacticallevel, and pragmatic enrichment at the cultural level, including nine types of pragmatic enrichment as image reshaping, sound reproduction, logic reorganization,rhetoric recreation, enrichment based on the historical factor, enrichment based onthe geographical factor, enrichment based on the literary factor, enrichment based onthe religious factor, and enrichment concerning the factors in value system as well.Secondly, pragmatic enrichment at the lexical level is usually applied when dealingwith the vague, abstract or obscure image or treating the lexis with beauty both inimplicit content and sound effect, so as to specify and reproduce the image;pragmatic enrichment at the syntactical level is often applied when dealing with thelong complex English sentences with didactic or emotional content or concerning therhetoric conventions, in order to make a logically coherent text for the target readers’comprehension and appreciation; pragmatic enrichment at the cultural level isalways applied concerning the historical, or geographical, or literary, or religiousfactors, or the factors in value system, which are all rooted in the two differentcultures between China and the Western. This kind of enrichment aims at enrichingthe contextual clues for the target readers to satisfy their expectations and avoidpossible obstacles in reading.Based on exploration into the pragmatic enrichment applied in Hsia’stranslation, this thesis tries to offer the delicate aspect or exquisiteness of Hsia’stranslation, and further to dig out the regularities for the application of pragmaticenrichment in E-C essay translation. It is hoped that the current thesis will be helpfulfor the future study on both the theory of pragmatic enrichment and the practice ofessay translation.