Cover not available
Article published In:
Target
Vol. 21:2 (2009) ► pp.209–234

Pragmatic shifts in two translations of Fusheng Liuji

A descriptive study of request behaviour

| The University of Macau
This study focuses on translation shifts in speech act realisation patterns in two English translations of the Chinese work Fusheng Liuji. It employs analytical tools from cross-cultural pragmatics to describe speech act behaviour in the original and its translations. Lin uses more translation shifts—including significant shifts in strategy use, and moderate shifts in information sequencing—than Pratt … Chiang, who mainly retain the original pragmatic features. Both the translators and the original author make frequent use of request formulae. The two translations also show marked shifts from lexical to syntactic modification of requests. The article further examines the translators’ approaches to translation in terms of their concept of translation and the historical and social contexts of their translations.
Keywords: translation shift, translation norm, cross-cultural pragmatics, request, formulaic language, Chinese literature
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Cross-cultural pragmatics and translation studies
  • 3.Method
    • 3.1Sample: The original and the translated texts
    • 3.2Methods of data analysis: the coding scheme
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Shifts in strategy use
    • 4.2Internal modifications
    • 4.3Formulaic expressions
    • 4.4External modifications: information sequencing
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1Translation shifts caused by linguistic constraints
    • 5.2Translation shifts at the translator’s discretion
    • 5.3Methodology: Tools of cross-cultural pragmatics in translation studies
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 16 December 2009
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/target.21.2.01wan
References (73)
References
Achiba, Machiko. 2003. Learning to Request in a Second Language: A Study of Child Interlanguage Pragmatics. Clevedon, England/Buffalo, NY: Multilingual Matters. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Austin, John L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Baker, Mona. 1992. In Other Words: A Coursebook on Translation. London: Taylor & Francis Limited.   DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Birch, Cyril. 1961. “Review of Chapters From a Floating Life. The Autobiography of a Chinese Artist by Shen Fu, translated by Shirley M. Black”. The Journal of Asian Studies 20:4. 526–527.   DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Blum-Kulka, Shoshana. 1986. “Shifts of cohesion and coherence in translation”. Juliane House and Shoshana Blum-Kulka, eds. Interlingual and Intercultural Communication. Discourse and Cognition in Translation and Second Language Acquisition Studies. Tübingen: Narr., 1986. 17–35.Google Scholar
. 1989. “Playing it safe: The role of conventionality in directness”. Shoshana Blum-Kulka, Juliane House and Gabriele Kasper, eds. Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Pub. Corp., 1989. 37–70.Google Scholar
Blum-Kulka, Shoshana, and Juliane House. 1989. “Investigating cross-cultural pragmatics: an introductory overview”. Shoshana Blum-Kulka, Juliane House and Gabriele Kasper, eds. Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Pub. Corp., 1989. 1–34.Google Scholar
Blum-Kulka, Shoshana, Juliane House, and Gabriele Kasper. 1989. Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Pub. Corp.Google Scholar
Boase-Beier, Jean. 2004. “Knowing and not knowing: Style, intention and the translation of a holocaust poem”. Language and Literature 13:1. 25–35.   DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Catford, John C. 1965. A Linguistic Theory of Translation: An Essay in Applied Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Chan, Wing-Tsit. 1947. “Ling Yutang, critic and interpreter”. College English 8:4. 163–169.   DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cohen, Andrew D. 1996. “Developing the ability to perform speech acts”. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 18:2. 253–267.   DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cosme, Christelle. 2006. “Clause combining across languages: A corpus-based study of English-French translation shifts”. Languages in Contrast 6:1. 71–108.   DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Doleželová-Velingerová, Milena, and Lubomír Doležel. 1972. “An Early Chinese Confessional Prose: Shen Fu’s Six Chapters of a Floating Life”. T’oung Pao, 2nd Series 58:1/5. 137–160.   DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dong, Hui <董晖>. 2002. “<老到圓熟出神入化: 林語堂《浮生六记》英譯本賞析>”. Journal of Xi’an Internat ional Studies University 10:3. 11–15.Google Scholar
Emery, Peter G. 2004. “Translation, equivalence and fidelity: A pragmatic approach”. Babel 50:2. 143–167.   DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Farghal, Mohammed, and Ahmed Borini. 1997. “Pragmareligious failure in translating Arabic politeness formulas into English: Evidence from Mahfouz’s Awlad Haritna”. Multilingua 16:1. 77–99.   DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gibbs, Raymond W. Jr. 1986. “What makes some indirect speech acts conventional?” Journal of Memory and Language 25:2. 181–196.   DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gutt, Ernst-August. 1991. Translation and relevance: Cognition and context. Oxford: Basil Black-well.Google Scholar
Hatim, Basil, and Jeremy Munday. 2004. Translation: An advanced resource book. London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
He, Xianbin. 2006. “Cultural status and language selection in translation”. Journal of Language and Politics 5:3. 415.   DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hegel, Robert E. 1986. “Review of The Story of the Stone, vol. 4 The Debt of Tears, vol. 5, The Dreamer Wakes by Cao Xueqin & E Gao, translated by John Minford”. Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR) 8:1/2. 129.Google Scholar
Hermans, Theo. 1999. Translation in Systems: Descriptive and Systemic Approaches Explained. Manchester, England: Saint Jerome.Google Scholar
Hickey, Leo, ed. 1998. The Pragmatics of Translation. Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
Howell, E. B. 1936. “Review of T’ien Hsia”. International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1931–1939) 15:3. 478. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Huang, Eva, and David Pollard. 1998. “Chinese translation”. Mona Baker and Kirsten Malmkjaer, eds. Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies. London/New York: Routledge, 1998. 365–376.Google Scholar
Huang, Martin W. 1995. Literati and Self-Re/Presentation: Autobiographical Sensibility in the Eighteenth-Century Chinese Novel. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Jakobson, Roman. 1959/2000. “On translation”. Lawrence Venuti, ed. The Translation Studies: Reader. London: Routledge, 1959/2000. 113–118.Google Scholar
Kasper, Gabrieleed. 1995. Pragmatics of Chinese as Native and Target Language. Honolulu: Second Language Teaching & Curriculum Center, University of Hawai’i at Manoa.Google Scholar
Kasper, Gabriele, and Kenneth R. Rose. 1999. „Pragmatics and SLA“. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 191. 81–104.   DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kirkpatrick, Andy. 1991. “Information sequencing in Mandarin letters of request”. Anthropological Linguistics 33:2. 183–203.Google Scholar
. 1992. “Schemas, authentic texts and cross-cultural communication”. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics supplement 91. 101–119. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Korzen, Iørn 2005. “Endocentric and exocentric languages in translation”. Perspectives: Studies in Translatology 13:1. 21–37.   DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lambert, José, and Hendrik van Gorp. 1985. “On describing translation”. Theo Hermans, ed. The Manipulation of Literature: Studies in Literary Translation. London: Croom Helm, 1985. 42–53.Google Scholar
Lee-Wong, Song Mei. 1994. “Imperatives in requests: Direct or impolite-observations from Chinese”. Pragmatics 4:4. 491–515.   DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Leuven-Zwart, Kitty M van. 1989. “Translation and original: Similarities and dissimilarities, I”. Target 1:2. 151–181.   DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Li, Shi-Wang <黎土旺>. 2007. “<文化取向与翻译策略:《浮生六记》两个英译本之比较>”. Foreign Languages and Their Teaching 7:220. 53–55.Google Scholar
Li, Yunxing. 1998. “Formal shifts in English-Chinese translation”. Perspectives: Studies in Translatology 6:1. 71–77.   DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lin, Yutang. 1940/1991. “<論翻譯> (On translation)”. Zhenhua Yang, ed. <翻譯論集> (Selected Essays on Translation) Shanghai: Shanghai Bookstore, 1940/1991. 6–32.Google Scholar
Malmkjaer, Kirsten. 1998. “Love thy neighbour: Will parallel corpora endear linguists to translators?” Meta 43:4. 534–541.   DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Marquez Reiter, Rosina. 2000. Linguistic Politeness in Britain and Uruguay: A Contrastive Study of Requests and Apologies. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.   DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mason, Ian, and Adriana Serban. 2003. “Deixis as an interactive feature in literary translations from Romanian into English”. Target 15:2. 269–294.   DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mauranen, Anna. 2002. “Will ‘translationese’ ruin a contrastive study”. Languages in Contrast 2:2. 161–185.   DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McMorran, Ian. 2000. “Chinese literary translation into English”. Olive Classe, ed. Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into English. Vol. 1. London/Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 2000. 278–281.Google Scholar
Olohan, Maeve. 2004. Introducing Corpora in Translation Studies. London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Puurtinen, Tiina. 2003. “Explicitating and implicitating source text ideology”. Across Languages and Cultures 4:1. 53–62.   DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pym, Anthony. 2004. “Propositions on cross-cultural communication and translation”. Target 16:1. 1–28.   DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rose, Kenneth R. 2000. “An exploratory cross-sectional study of interlanguage pragmatic development”. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 22:1. 27–67.   DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Scollon, Ron, and Suzanne Wong Scollon. 1995. Intercultural Communication: A Discourse Approach. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Scollon, Ron, and Wong Suzanne Scollon. 1991. “Topic confusion in English-Asian discourse”. World Englishes 10:2. 113–125.   DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Searle, John R. 1975. “Indirect speech acts”. Peter Cole and Jerry Morgan, eds. Syntax and Semantics: Vol. 31. Speech Acts. New York: Academic Press, 1975. 59–82. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Searle, John R 1969. Speech acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. London: Cambridge University Press.   DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sequeiros, Xose Rosales. 2002. “Interlingual pragmatic enrichment in translation”. Journal of Pragmatics 34:8. 1069–1089.   DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Shen, Fu. 1960. The Autobiography of a Chinese Artist: Shen Fu. Translated by Shirley M. Black. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
1983. Six Records of a Floating Life. Translated by Leonard Pratt and Su-Hui Chiang. London: Penguin Classics.Google Scholar
1999. Six Chapters of a Floating Life (浮生六記). Translated by Yutang Lin. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press.Google Scholar
Skewis, Malcolm. 2003. “Mitigated directness in Honglou meng: Directive speech acts and politeness in eighteenth century Chinese”. Journal of Pragmatics 351. 161–189.   DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Toury, Gideon. 1995. Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.   DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Trosborg, Anna. 1995. Interlanguage Pragmatics: Requests, Complaints and Apologies. Berlin, Federal Republic of Germany: Mouton de Gruyter.   DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Venuti, Lawrence. 1995. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London/New York: Routledge.   DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2004. “Translation, community, utopia”. Lawrence Venuti, ed. The Translation Studies: Reader. 2004. 482–502.Google Scholar
Vinay, Jean-Paul, and Jean Darbelnet. 1958/1995. Comparative stylistics of French and English: A methodology for translation. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.Google Scholar
Wang, John C. Y. 1976. “Review of The Story of the Stone, vol. 1, The Golden Days by Cao Xueqin, translated by David Hawkes”. The Journal of Asian Studies 35:2. 302–304. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wang, Vincent Xian. 2006. Chinese EFL Learners’ Pragmatic Competence in Requests. PhD dissertation. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Queensland.Google Scholar
. 2007. “A pragmatic examination of translation of implied meaning”. Translation Watch Quarterly 3:3. 34–45.Google Scholar
Wei, Wei-Hua. 2005. A Study of the Two English Versions of Fu Sheng Liu Ji from the Perspective of Skopos Theory. Unpublished MA dissertation, Guangxi Normal U.Google Scholar
Yang, Gladys. 1980. “Review of The Story of the Stone. vol. I: The Golden Days by Cao Xueqin, translated by David Hawkes”. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 43:3. 621–622.   DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Yu, Ming-Chung. 1999. Cross-Cultural and Interlanguage Pragmatics: Developing Communicative Competence in a Second Language. Unpublished PhD dissertation, Harvard U.Google Scholar
Cited by (3)

Cited by three other publications

Song, Qijun & Junfeng Zhang
2023. Ideological Mediation: Metaphor Shifts in Translating the Communist Party of China’s Centenary Speech. Critical Arts 37:6 ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Wang, Vincent X.
2020. Pragmatics and Chinese Translation. In Key Issues in Translation Studies in China [New Frontiers in Translation Studies, ], ► pp. 77 ff. DOI logo
Liang, Linxin & Mingwu Xu
2018. A Comparative Analysis of the Reception of Four English Versions ofFu Sheng Liu Ji: Translation, Publication and International Circulation. Translation Review 101:1 ► pp. 7 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 27 september 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.