Pragmatic reproduction of cultural-linguistic referents in translation from Spanish to Chinese

Zhishuo Ding

doi:10.5209/clac.67933

Abstract

This paper examines the pragmatic translation of cultural-linguistic items through a relevance-theoretic study. The results suggest: 1) implicative value of the cultural-linguistic items is context-dependent and 2) loss of the linguistic form might imply the loss of the implicit clue. The study aims to expose the pragmatic values conveyed by the cultural-linguistic elements of Spanish and its Chinese translation. Furthermore, it explores how much original Spanish linguistic elements are accessible to the target readers of the Chinese translation. Based on a Spanish novel, namely La Colmena, and its Chinese translation Feng Fang, linguistic cultural referents from the Spanish original and their translations were compared, considering their cognitive contexts. This research points to the fact that the cognitive-environmental values of cultural-linguistic elements are generally underestimated, especially in Spanish-to-Chinese translation and, a large number of Spanish linguistic items do not maintain their implicatures in the Chinese translation due to different contextual assumptions.

Highlights

The translated term will require more processing effort, and the contextual effect reduces as well. These results demonstrate that the accessibility of the implicatures of the cultural-linguistic elements depends on the contextual assumptions of the target readers
This article has pragmatically explored the reproduction of cultural-linguistic items with an original Spanish novel and its Chinese rendition
The relevance theory is incorporated as the orientation of this study, which mainly concerns the cognitive context in translation studies

Summary

Introduction

An overview of previous translation studies on linguistic culture. There are a number of studies which concentrate on linguistic culture or focus on semantic or pragmatic features (Wu 2013; Mangiron 2008; Molina 2006; Nida 1945), but still, the implicative quality of cultural-linguistic elements has not yet been thoroughly documented. Gutt (2014), who introduced relevance theory into translation studies, points to the fact that one of the features contributing to the interpretation of the implicature is the cognitive context, which has two primordial factors: contextual effect and its processing effort. Despite an increasing number of translation studies focusing on relevance theory, the scholarly references on the relevance-theoretic view of cultural-linguistic study are scarce, relating to translations between Spanish and Chinese

Objectives

Discussion

Conclusion