The Chinese Translation Of Personal Pronouns In The Letters Of Samuel Beckett Ⅰ

The report discusses the Chinese translation of personal pronouns as is illustrated in examples from letters from 1938 to 1940 in The Letters of Samuel Beckett Ⅰ(hereafter referred to as Letters),aiming at a more systematic study of the Chinese translation of personal pronouns and contribution to the development of the relevant field.Personal pronouns serve as an irreplaceable linguistic component in language.It no doubt plays an important role in Letters which offers for the first time a comprehensive range of letters from Beckett,one of the greatest literary figures of the twentieth century,to his friends,publishers,and colleagues.Substantial numbers of personal pronouns and the first person pronouns,in particular,are employed here to achieve the interpersonal function of letters.In this regard,their Chinese translation remains a major problem to be solved and researched in the rendering of Letters.On the basis of previous studies,the report sums up three translation principles of personal pronouns,that is,to achieve textual coherence,to avoid ambiguity and to represent the emotion and tone of the addresser.According to characteristics of personal pronouns in the translation,it concludes five Chinese translation methods including omission,literal translation,repetition,substitution and addition.Given that the current studies on this approach are made mainly from perspectives of contrastive linguistics and corpus linguistics and a vast majority of them lack a clear theoretical perspective,this report decides to examine this phenomenon through the lens of a more inclusive and complicated term – “translation context” for a systematic and persuasive conclusion.In short,a translation context is an environment constructed by a translator engaging in the translation practice,usually involving both the source and the target languages and cultures,three subjects(the writer,the translator and the reader)and their psychological world,discourse world and external world.On this basis,the report tries to represent the construction of the translator’s translation context with examples from Letters and explores the underlying reasons for this phenomenon from the contexts of language,situation,and culture.It finds that all these contextual factors jointly affect the entire translation process of personal pronouns.