《A Pragmatic Concept of Translation》.doc

A Pragmatic Concept of Translation* Hsiu-Hwang Ho1.The aim of this paper Translation is a fairly common activity known to most of us. It is an activity of rewriting a body of discourse into another body of discourse upon the condition that between the original body of discourse and the resulting one, there exists some certain sort of relationship. What exactly this relationship is, I shall try to specify in this discussion. However, I am not going to develop a complete theory of translation. What I wish to do is this: to consider translation as a linguistic activity which can be illuminated by the theory of meaning proposed and developed by Henry S. Leonard [1],[2],[3],[4], and thereon to outline a pragmatic concept of translation. By a body of discourse I mean a string of signs related one with the other in such a way that the whole string taken as a unit can be used to signify some purpose or purposes intended by the person who utters the string.1 In this paper, I shall propose a definition, or rule, establishing the circumstances under which one may say that one body of discourse D is a translation of another body of discourse D. A succession of different considerations will lead to a succession of refinements of that definition.2.Interlinguistic and intralinguistic translation Translation may proceed within a language, or it may proceed between one language and another language. As an example of the former, we may take the activity in which we rewrite a sentence into another sentence within the same language in order to facilitate understanding; as examples of the latter, we may take those activities of rewriting one of Shakespeares poems into its story in prose, or rewriting Heines Du Bist wie eine Blume into English. He shall call the former an intralinguistic translation , and the latter, interlinguistic ones.2 It is interlinguistic translation which primarily concerns us in this paper. Yet most of what we shall have to say will also apply to intralingu