Pragmatic Equivalence Approach To Two Chinese Versions Of The Picture Of Dorian Gray

Along with the development of pragmatics and translation studies,much attention has been paid to pragmatic approach to translation.Pragmatics mainly concerns the meaning of the specific utterance in a given situation;therefore,in order to achieve pragmatic equivalence in translation,it is essential to discuss context,pragmatic meaning and intentions of source texts.Based on the viewpoints of pragmatic translation,translation is viewed as a kind of information exchange activity,emphasizing pragmatic meaning in language communication and aiming to achieve the same pragmatic effect in target readers as that of source readers.Pragmatic translation theorists also consider translation as a communicative process in the specific social situation and a dynamic course which involves the negotiation of meaning between the authors and the readers of texts.Hence,a good translation not only transfers linguistic information of the original text,but also focuses on conveying cultural information and the implied meaning beyond the utterances.Under the guidance of pragmatic translation theory,this paper attempts to probe into the significance and feasibility of applying pragmatic equivalence into literary translation and how to achieve pragmatic equivalence to a maximum degree from the perspective of pragmatic meaning and context.Pragmatic equivalence,as a kind of principle and objective in translation practice and an approach to translation studies,has drawn more and more attention these years in China and abroad.Wilde's renowned novel The Picture of Dorian Gray is one of the British literary classics in the 19 th century.In view of pragmatic translation theory,this paper intends to analyze pragmalinguistic equivalence and socio-pragmatic equivalence by selecting two Chinese versions of The Picture of Dorian Gray by Huang Yuanshen(2004)and Wu Mengru(2015)as corpus.A comparative analysis of these two versions from the linguistic and cultural perspectives presents that implicatures,contextual factors and translation strategy selection will exert great influence on the output of translation.It is of paramount importance for translators to highlight implicit meaning and contexts of source texts to ensure the quality of translation.