Open AccessPragmatic reproduction of cultural-linguistic referents in translation from Spanish to Chinese
Author(s) -
Zhishuo Ding
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
círculo de lingüística aplicada a la comunicación
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.298
H-Index - 6
ISSN - 1576-4737
DOI - 10.5209/clac.67933
Subject(s) - linguistics , relevance (law) , linguistic context , context (archaeology) , psychology , translation (biology) , cognition , sociology , relevance theory , linguistic analysis , history , philosophy , biochemistry , chemistry , archaeology , neuroscience , messenger rna , political science , gene , law
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.