Pragmatics and chinese translation

Abstract

Linguistic pragmatics examines implied meaning in the context of language use, especially on how people do things with language. This layer of meaning is certainly relevant to translation practice as well as to translation studies. In this chapter, we survey the research area and discuss two categories of studies—pragmatics as perspective and pragmatics as behaviour. We examine a case study to illustrate how speech act theory can guide empirical translation studies and bring up interesting findings. The chapter concludes with remarks on the merits and demerits of current pragmatics-oriented Chinese translation studies (TS) and suggests some directions for future research.