A Study On The Translations Of Socio-Semiotic Meanings

Language is broadly recognized as a sign system, while semiotics refers to the science delving deeper into the sign systems. As a branch of semiotics, socio-semiotics explores the social dimension of meaning, and serves as a brand-new science that is established on the basis of semiology and delving deeper into the social fields. Closely connected with social ingredients, communicated with cultural elements, and integrated with linguistic features, socio-semiotics gets a comprehensive command and a thorough analysis of translation practice, which provides fresh perspective and extensively broad stage for the development and research of translation practice. Socio-semiotics is divided into three dominant categories in light of the rapports among verbal signs and entities, signs and users, namely,the referential meaning, intralingual meaning and pragmatic meaning. Referential meaning refers to the relationship between verbal signs and entities in the world they refer to, which is the most translatable because of its objective and cognitive nature. Intralingual meaning refers to the relationship between verbal signs themselves, which is the major cause for untranslatability due to the specific linguistic features of different language families. Pragmatic meaning refers to the relationship between verbal signs and their users, is translatable but easily confined by pragmatic cultural elements. Language translation manifests message transition between two semiotic systems, therefore ample emphasis should be borne on socio-semiotic perspective.In light of the theory of functional equivalence advanced by E.A.Nida, this thesis attempts to discuss the impact and significance of socio-semiotics on translation of Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out via two translation approaches proposed by Peter Newmark, and analyze the way communicative translation and semantic translation convey the three socio-semiotic meanings. Both of the two approaches appear in the translated version of Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out by Howard Goldblatt. Sometimes the translation even appears in a combined approach. Hence, the author is convinced that there is no absolute communicative or semantic translation for Goldblatt, but an overall communicative tendency with certain mistranslations and translation omissions. Semantic translation is dedicated to source language while communicative translation to target language. The rational comprehension and adoption of two approaches would contribute greatly to the authenticity of translation from the standpoint of socio-semiotics. Therefore, a thorough research on this prospect might be valuable to optimize the faithfulness of translation.