本文是一篇语言学论文，笔者认为中国的英语学习者在英语口语和其他学习活动中经常发生语用失误，这是因为他们的老师往往忽视了培养学生语用能力的重要性，而只注重语言能力。语用失误有可能导致交际失败，进而无法达到预期的交际效果。因此，中国法院判决英译中的语用失误可能会降低中国的司法效率。
CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION
1.1 Research background
In the last decade, China’s Belt and Road Initiative and economic takeoff have enhanced the connectivity with foreign countries, companies and foreigners. Take Shanghai for example: In 2018, Shanghai had approximately 164,800 foreigners with legal residency permits.1 However, for different reasons, some of them are embroiled in various litigation. Subject to Article 139 of Constitution of the People’s Republic of China (effective since March 11, 2018) and Article 262 of Civil Procedure Law of the PRC (effective since July 1, 2017), foreign parties are guaranteed the right to use their native languages in court proceedings, and indictments, court judgments and other documents should be written, according to actual needs, in their native language.
Moreover, in 2018, Chinese courts heard 15,000 foreign-related civil and commercial cases of first instance. As a result of China’s deepening of judicial transparency and fairness reform, court judgments are made public online. In this context, the translation of Chinese judgments of high-quality is urgently needed. However, as a cross-linguistic, cross-juristic and cross-culture event, the translation of Chinese court judgments has failed to be paid attention to by researchers and the relevant government agencies, and thus pragmatic failures are rampant and even international disputes arising therefrom. In order to address these problems and improve the quality of translating judgments, this paper focuses on the “pragmatic failures” in the English translation of Chinese court judgments.
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1.2 Rationale
Empirical research on the field of pragmatic failures has been carried out, but the pragmatic failures in legal texts are still out of sight. In the field of second language learning, pragmatic failure is a hot topic. From the research results of those studies, English-learners in China tend to make pragmatic failures, and also in Russia, Korea, and other countries since these countries’ language is distantly related to English. Also, several studies are conducted to explore the pragmatic failures in the English translation of Chinese texts such as public notices and advertisements. As a consequence, it is reasonable to assume that pragmatic failures do exist in the English translation of Chinese judgments. Furthermore, the English translation of Chinese court judgments is a cross-linguistic, cross-juristic and cross-culture event, making it a more arduous task than the English translation of daily discourses. Therefore, this study is academically significant.
Pragmatic failures may lead to confusion and communication breakdown to a greater or lesser degree in practice. Similarly, the pragmatic failures in the English translation of Chinese court judgments have the potential to reduce judicial efficiency and increase the waste of judicial resources. Consequently, this study is also practically significant.
As more and more foreign-related cases spring up, the English translation of Chinese court judgments is urgently needed. Hopefully, this study may provide reference and guidance for court judgment translators and legal translation educators so as to shed light on the improvement of translation quality of the English translation of Chinese court judgments and increase the communication efficiency between China and Common law jurisdictions.
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CHAPTER TWO LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1 Definition of pragmatic failures
The concept of “pragmatic failures” are first proposed by Thomas in 1983 (Thomas, 1983). Thomas (1983) believes that pragmatic failure arises where the meaning interpreted by the hearer differs from what the speaker wants to convey or when the speaker believes the meaning obtained by the hearer would be different.
Subsequently, domestic scholars have done a series of studies in this field. Zhang (2000) interprets it this way “pragmatic failure happens when the speaker fails to take the specific context into consideration, as well as the speaker’s and hearer’s identities, social standing, and the occasion, or when the speaker ignores the target culture’s special values.” Sun and Dai (2002) define pragmatic failure in a more detailed way pointing out that “pragmatic failure occurs when a speaker uses the linguistic codes appropriately yet fails to say them in a suitable manner, which is a violation of interpersonal interaction norms and social conventions. This would lead to unintended or undesirable communication effect.” He (2002: 202) argues that “pragmatic failure should not apply to general performance errors made in language usage, but to an improper manner of speaking, inappropriate idiomatic expressions, etc., which contributes to communication breakdown to produce desired effects”. Qian (1997: 215) believes that “the speaker uses grammatically correct sentences in oral communication, but unwittingly breaks interpersonal interaction norms and social standards, and does not take little notice of time, space and address and loses sight of the object we target at”. As a result, this kind of error is known as pragmatic failure (Qian, 2005: 195).
Generally speaking, pragmatic failure means that the meaning received by the hearer is not the meaning the speaker intended to express, which may lead to misunderstandings, clashes, and unintelligibility in communication.
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2.2 Classification of pragmatic failures
Leech classified pragmatics into pragmalinguistics and sociopragmatic (Leech, 1983: 11). Pragmalinguistics refers to the linguistic resources for conveying communicative acts and interpersonal meanings; sociopragmatics refers to the social perceptions underlying participants’ interpretation and performance of communicative acts. Based on this classification, Thomas (1983) differentiates between two kinds of pragmatic failures: pragmalinguistic failure and sociopragmatic failure. Basically speaking, the former is a linguistic issue triggered by discrepancies in linguistic coding of pragmatic force. On the other hand, the latter results from cross-culturally different conceptions of what constitutes acceptable linguistic behavior (Riley, 2007: 191). Usually, scholars use Thomas’s classification of pragmatic failures in their research on pragmatic failures (e.g., Zheng & Huang, 2010; Long, 2017). However, Zhang (2000) includes linguistic errors including spelling errors and grammatical errors in the scope of pragmatic failures even Thomas (1983) and many scholars do not regard linguistic errors as a kind of pragmatic failure. Also, Thomas’s classification of pragmatic failures is criticized by a few scholars. Some pragmatic failures can be viewed as pragmalinguistic failure and can also be regarded as sociopragmatic failure. The overlap between the two types of pragmatic failures makes it hard to distinguish between pragmalinguistic failure and sociopragmatic failure (Liu, 2008). Additionally, some pragmatic failure in human communication is neither pragmalinguistic failure nor sociopragmatic failure. Therefore, Thomas’s division is not comprehensive enough (Liu & Zhong, 2003).
语言学论文参考
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CHAPTER THREE THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK ............................. 13
3.1 Structure of Chinese court judgments .................................... 13
3.2 Pragmatic principles of court judgment translation ............................ 14
3.3 Classification of pragmatic failures for the present study ................... 17
CHAPTER FOUR RESEARCH METHODOLOGY ..................................... 22
4.1 Research methods ............................ 22
4.2 Data and data collection ......................... 22
4.3 Inter-rater reliability ........................... 24
CHAPTER FIVE ANALYSIS OF PRAGMATIC FAILURES IN THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF CHINESE JUDGMENTS ............... 28
5.1 Analysis of pramalinguistic failures ................................. 28
5.1.1 Analysis of the mistranslation of everyday expressions .................... 28
5.1.2 Analysis of the mistranslation of legal speech acts ........................... 30
CHAPTER SIX METHODOLOGICAL TRIANGULATION
6.1 Questionnaire design
The questionnaire is designed to find out whether the analysis of the pragmatic failures in the English translation of Chinese court judgments is agreed by the people that are engaged in legal translation and translation and linguistics studies, thus revealing the validity of the present study. Two parts consist of the questionnaire. The first part is to investigate the respondents’ occupations and what kinds of certificates pertaining to translation qualifications they possess. The second part of the questionnaire uses the measurement of Likert’s 5 level scale are designed from two dimensions: attitudes towards the analysis of pragmalinguistic failures (hereinafter referred to as “ATAPF”), attitudes towards the analysis of sociopragmatic failures (hereinafter referred to as “ATASF”).
1) Pragmalinguistic failures consist of five types of pragmatic failures: mistranslation of everyday expressions, mistranslation of citations, mistranslation of logical connectors, mistranslation of legal speech acts and mistranslation of deixis. It is suggested in the previous section that court judgment translators should use the method of transliteration plus a footnote to translate the citations in Chinese court judgments. The respondents’ agreement on the method means they consent to the analysis of mistranslated citations in the present study. By the same token, the analysis of mistranslated everyday expressions, logical connectors, legal speech acts and deixis is verified by asking the respondents whether they agree with the author’s investigation of the other four types of pragmalinguistic failures.
2) Terminological incongruency and legal-term inconsistency fall into the category of sociopragmatic failures. As mentioned before, terminological incongruency arises when court judgment translators fail to take the differences of legal concepts and legal culture between Chinese law system and Common law system into consideration. Legal-term inconsistency means court judgment translators use various words or phrases to translate one legal term. If respondents agree that court translators should be aware of these differences and use one word and phrase to translate one legal term, the analysis of sociopragmatic failures in the present study is backed up by them.
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CHAPTER SEVEN CONCLUSION
7.1 Overview of the study
The present study is the research on the pragmatic failures in the English translation of Chinese judgments. With the help of the corpus tool and a number of other assistant tools, the pragmatic failures are carefully tagged, collected and analyzed according to the theoretical framework.
In the beginning, this paper briefly introduces the research background, research rationale, research objective and questions, methodology and data collection and the organization of this paper.
Chapter 2 reviews a number of empirical studies pertaining to the present study, including definitions of pragmatic failure, relevant studies on pragmatic failure, pragmatic failures in translation, and research on the translation of judgments. There is no doubt that their research is both academically and practically significant. From the research results of their studies, making pragmatic failures are common for second L2 learners. However, the research concerning the pragmatic failures in legal texts is very limited. Based on the hypothesis that pragmatic failures occur in the English translation of Chinese court judgments as court judgment translation is more complicated than the translation of daily discourse, and the fact that judgment translation of high quality is urgently needed in China, the topic of the study is the pragmatic failures in the English translation of Chinese court judgments. Combined with Thomas’s definition of pragmatic failures, the linguistic characteristics of Chinese judgments, the linguistic features of legal English and the discrepancies of the two legal systems, the author proposes seven pragmatic principles that judgment translators should follow in chapter 3. Consequently, the research methodology is introduced, including research methods, data and data collection, inter-rater reliability and methodological triangulation.
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