A Report On Dialogue Translation In Fiction Under Guidance Of Cooperative Principle

The culture and customs of a country are always mirrored in literary works.Excellent literary works invariably feature characters that impress readers.Dialogue plays a vital role in featuring characters– whether decent or villainous.An experienced writer portrays vivid characters and indirectly drives the plot to a climax in just a few sentences.Fiction dialogues are such sentences that enable readers to understand the psychological changes of each character in multidimensional ways,as well as to follow the pace of the plot development.Therefore,improving the accuracy of dialogue translation proves key to leveling up the overall quality of translation.In 1975,the language philosopher Herbert Paul Grice formally put forward Cooperative Principle(CP),in which he believed that in the process of communication,both participants will follow a certain principle intentionally or otherwise to ensure that the dialogue moves on smoothly.Specifically,the principle contains four maxims: the Maxim of Quantity,the Maxim of Quality,the Maxim of Relation,and the Maxim of Manner.From the fiction Mischievous Maid Faynie,this report extracts several representative dialogues and analyzes their conversational implicature from the perspective of flouting the four maxims of CP.Accordingly,to avoid the loss of the implicature,this report summarizes a series of applicable translation strategies for different situations,such as strategies of negation,rewriting,and modal expressions.These strategies help to preserve the meaning and style of the source text as much as possible,thus allowing readers of the target text to enjoy the reading pleasure of deducing the implicature by themselves.Besides,these strategies help maintain the pragmatic equivalence between the source text and target text at large.