A brief analysis of cultural and pragmatic factors in business English translation
Introduction: Business English translation is a subject that integrates various languages and business knowledge. We will share with you a paper on cultural and pragmatic factors in business English translation. Come and have a look!
Abstract: With the internationalization and integration of business, multicultural coexistence is imperative, and culture has become extremely important in the exchanges and trade between countries. Language is not only a part of culture, but also a carrier of culture. As the most widely used language in international business activities, English has attracted extensive attention of researchers in recent years. At the same time, the study of cultural factors in business English has attracted great attention of scholars. On the basis of previous studies on cultural factors in business English translation, this paper introduces pragmatic factors, aiming at analyzing pragmatic factors in cross-cultural business English translation, and putting forward principles and methods of business English translation from a pragmatic perspective to avoid pragmatic failures.
Keywords: business English translation; Cross-culture; Pragmatic factors
1 Preface
Language is a part and carrier of culture, which plays an important role in culture. Interlanguage translation is not only the exchange of two languages, but also the transmission of two cultures. Culture is a factor that cannot be ignored in translation, just like Eugene, a famous American translator? Nida said:? To really do a good job in translation, it is even more important to master two cultures than two languages, because words are meaningful only when they are used in a specific culture. ? The influence of cultural factors on translation activities has been favored by linguists in recent years. Of course, it has also attracted the attention of international business English users or researchers, and studies on the relationship between business English translation and culture have mushroomed. However, few people make an objective and comprehensive analysis of pragmatic factors in business English translation. This paper aims to fill this gap, so as to give some enlightenment to the solution of pragmatic factors involved in business English translation activities.
2 Business English translation and cultural and pragmatic factors
International business activities are a kind of cross-cultural communication. As a global business language, English is famous for its diversity and variability. With the economic exchanges between China and other countries becoming more and more frequent, various commercial enterprises have flourished. In economic communication, business English translation plays an important role, and whether the translation is appropriate or not may be related to the failure of economic communication.
As a part of translation activities, business English translation itself is a kind of interlingual conversion, which involves not only the conversion of one language symbol into another, but also the communication between different business cultures. Sperber& Wilson (1995:2) thinks? Communication style is even more important than communication content? . Therefore, if a translator wants to succeed, he must first let the target readers get the same reasoning distance as the original readers, and then consider it? Reproduce the set of assumptions made by the original author about his intended readers? . The translation process first begins with the source language communication, and the source language communication begins with the explicit process from the communicator's point of view and then the inferential process from the listener's point of view. Therefore, only when the translator reproduces the necessary reasoning according to the respective environment of the speaker and the listener can the translation work succeed in stages. To engage in business English translation, one should not only be proficient in the language, but also be familiar with the culture of the original target language. Various cultural conflicts will occur in cross-cultural business communication, and the proper use of language to resolve cultural conflicts is one of the tasks of pragmatics. Therefore, the understanding and understanding of cross-cultural business communication can not be separated from the support of pragmatics.
As a discipline that integrates various languages and business knowledge, business English translation is closely related to culture and pragmatic factors. Culture is the cornerstone, business English translation is the transformation generator, and pragmatics is an essential application of business English translation.
3 Analysis of Pragmatic Factors in Business English Translation
Pragmatics is a subject that studies the use and understanding of language, how the speaker uses language and external context to express meaning, and how the listener decodes and infers the words spoken by the speaker. As a cross-cultural communication activity, translation is a ternary relationship, that is, the transmission of ideas and cultures of the original author, translator and target readers. The translator plays a key role in this process: firstly, the listener needs to make use of his own knowledge of the target language and cultural background, and figure out the author's translation intention in the process of translation, and use pragmatic principles to reason and decode the source text. Then the translator changes his role and becomes a speaker. Through his own knowledge of the target language and cultural background, he can grasp the understanding of the target readers and present the results of decoding the original text according to the original author's intention and style. In the process of cross-cultural translation, due to different cultural backgrounds, different translators have different understandings of the original text. This involves understanding, reconstruction, the handling of pragmatic and cultural factors in the translation, and the transmission of pragmatic intention of the original. In the process of translation, the translator should fully understand the pragmatic connotation, base on the original context, fully tap the pragmatic intention of the original author, make use of various semantic associations in the article, deeply understand the cultural connotation contained in the article, and at the same time, present a fluent and highly accepted translation to the readers in combination with the readers' understanding, so as to achieve the standards and significance of cultural translation.
For example, in the trademark translation of business English, we should take into account the cultural habits and aesthetic psychology of Chinese and foreign consumers, and we should not simply transliterate or translate them freely. Someone used to put? White elephant? The battery was translated into White Elephant, which made the product frustrated in the European and American markets. Because in English, white elephant is? Useless and cumbersome things? . In addition, the mistakes in language use in business English translation are caused by the lack of business professional knowledge. For example, the draft has been presented to the bank of China for clean collection. clean? No? Clean? The meaning of? collection? Don't do it? Collection? Explain? clean collection? Finger? Clean collection? . The draft has been handed over to the Bank of China for clean collection. Polysemy is a common phenomenon in business English. When translating, it should be analyzed in combination with specific context to accurately grasp the pragmatic information of words and avoid mistranslation.
4 Conclusion
Different factors constitute different cultural systems between the East and the West, and people's concepts, traditions, ways of thinking, values and language expressions are also quite different. Business English translation, as a kind of cross-cultural inter-language communication, requires the translator to have proficient language knowledge, be familiar with many cultures, master pragmatic skills, and have certain other types of functional mechanisms. In addition, when using memetics to guide translation, whether foreignization translation or domestication translation should be adopted, and so on. These problems need further discussion.
references
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