More than 400 years has passed since the birth of Shakespeares first play, but the charm of Shakespeares gem-like masterpieces never fades. As a talented and productive writer, Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets, 2 long narrative poems and 37 plays during his life time. And his unparalleled achievement and large readership all over the world elevate him to the position of "first universal author" (Qiu Kean, 2006: 3). His early plays were mainly comedies and histories and till about 1608 he wrote tragedies including the famous Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear. In the last period of Shakespeare's writing career, tragicomedies or romances became his focus. His plays are a great landmark in the history of world literature for his vivid depiction of various characters, relations, social classes, and emotions in a realistic and artistic manner. Shakespeare's works offer a bounty mine for scholars, literary critics, linguists, translators, philosophers and even psychologists to conduct a variety of studies. Over the past few centuries, his works have been translated and retranslated into different languages, which stimulates studies on translations of Shakespeare's works, especially the plays and sonnets from different theoretic viewpoints.
The first Chinese version of Shakespeare's works dated back to 1903 when a book in classical Chinese entitled English Shakespeare: Legends from Overseas was published by Shanghai Dawen Press. Tian Han was the first man who translated Hamlet into vernacular Chinese in 1921 and Hu Shi was the first one who put forward the plan of translating the complete works of Shakespeare. Since the early 20th century, many famous scholars have devoted themselves to the translation of Shakespeare's dramas and produced elegant and graceful Chinese versions one after another (Li Weimin, 2004), such as Zhang Caizhen, Dai Wangshu, Liang Shiqiu, Zhu Shenghao, Cao Weifeng, Bian Zhilin, Cao Yu, Fang Ping, etc. By far, there are in total 6 series of Chinese translations of the complete works of Shakespeare, respectively published in 1957 by Zhu Shenghao and Yu Erchang, in 1967 by Liang Shiqiu, in 1978 by Zhu Shenghao et al., in 1997 by Zhu Shenghao et al., in 1998 by Zhu Shenghao et al., and in 2008 by Fang Ping et al, among which the translations of Shakespeare's works by Liang Shiqiu, Zhu Shenghao, and Fang Ping are the best-known and most influential in China.
Liang Shiqiu spent thirty-seven years in translating the plays by Shakespeare and his translations were published by Far East Publishing House in Taiwan. Zhu Shenghao translated thirty-one dramas in total and his translations made up the major component of the most popular Chinese version The Complete Works of Shakespeare published by Yilin Press. In the 1990s, Fang Ping, finished his version of Shakespeare's plays, the latest Chinese version of Shakespeare's collected works which was published by Hebei Education Press. A significant feature with Fang Ping's translation is that his translation is in form of verse while most of the other versions are in the form of prose.
With so many translations of Shakespeare's works coming out, the relevant studies on these translations are also significant. By 2004, more than 150 papers had been published since the 1950s and most of the previous studies upon the Chinese translation of Shakespearean works were mainly from the philological perspective, more of a comparative literature nature than of a pragmatic turn, even less from the angle of cultures of the two language systems (Li Weiming, 2004). Later studies on the macro-level started to focus on cultural differences between the Chinese and English communities and the pragmatic functions of certain words and phrases.
Among all the translators, Liang Shiqiu is the only one who finished the translation by himself, and translated most of Shakespeare's plays within the shortest time. Many scholars conducted comparative studies on his translations and the others' in terms of translator styles, translation motivations, etc. Liang aims at signifying and introducing the linguistic and cultural differences of the foreign text into China. He emphasizes the utter fidelity to the source text and constantly pursues the preservation of genuineness of the original work. His purpose is to introduce the foreign culture to Chinese readers, especially those educated intellectuals and literary scholars. As Liu Bingshan states, the Chinese version by Liang Shiqiu is a guide for the readers who have a knowledge of English to study the original works of Shakespeare (Liu Bingshan, 2000: 244) and unlike Zhu's wish to make Shakespeare's works available to common people, Liang' s purpose of translation is to arouse readers' interest in the original text. Li Weimin (2008) claims that patriotism and the sense of responsibility to introduce Shakespeare into China is the drive for Zhu Shenghao to overcome all kinds of difficulties during the anti-Japanese wars to keep on translating till the end of his life. His ultimate aim of the translation is to popularize Shakespeare's works among Chinese ordinary people. While Fang Ping suggests that in the translation of Shakespeare's plays, what should be emphasized include the artistic form of the language and the connection between form and content. The repetition of the meaning of the ST is not enough. The translator should try to be faithful to the ST in more aspects like voice, mood, image, etc (Fang Ping, 2000).
From the 1990s onwards, as descriptive translation studies and corpus-based translation studies are advancing, corpus-based translation studies provide an empirical research methodology in describing the laws of translation by studying the target text in a statistic-based manner. It analyzes computer-readable texts in a variety of ways with the intention of tracing patterns and common features across large amount of data so as to objectively make relevant investigations of the translations. Major trends that have been observed in corpus-based translation studies include the study of corpora-construction for the purpose of translation studies, the corpus-based study of linguistic features of translated texts, and the corpus-based study of individual translator's style (Hu Kaibao, 2007). The advantages of corpus-based translation studies such as automatic extraction, bilingual concurrence and authentic texts facilitate the relevant studies from novel perspectives like translation universals, cultural contrasts, interpersonal meanings in both the original and the translation, etc.
Besides, the pragmatic approach to translation studies is also increasingly adopted in studying translations of Shakespeare's works such as the application of Austin's and Searle's Speech Act Theory (SAT), Grice's Cooperative Principle (CP), Leech's Politeness Principle (PP), Brown and Levinson's influential theory about the face-saving view of politeness, etc. As a response to this general tendency of studies of Chinese translations of Shakespeare's works, this paper develops a corpus-based study of Liang Shiqiu's, Zhu Shenghao's and Fang Ping's translations of Shakespeare's 23 plays, with the main focus on their translations of the discourse marker why in the plays from a pragmatic and functional perspective.
2.2 Studies of Discourse Markers
The rapid development of pragmatics in the 1970s made many researchers turn their attention to the study of discourse markers. This term has been studied under a variety of labels, among which are particles, discourse operators, pragmatic markers, discourse connectives, etc. The terminological diversity reflects the wide range of linguistic approaches and research perspectives employed in the studies of DMs and the multiplicity of functions which DMs are said to fulfill. The reason for us to choose the term "discourse marker" lies in its widest currency. This section will give a chronological review of different definitions, descriptions and theories of DMs in order to get a better understanding of the role of DMs in communication.
2.2.1 Definition and Terminology of DMs
What is a discourse marker? Although it has received much attention in the past few years, there is no consensus about the definition of a discourse marker. A number of researchers have provided different answers to this question as they view DMs from different perspectives.
Levinson (1983) shows great interest in DMs in his book Pragmatics and considers it as a class worth studying due to its own merits. As far as his studies are concerned, DMs are those words and phrases that are usually used in the initial place of an utterance, such as therefore, still, however, anyway, in conclusion, etc. Besides, he claims that such words and phrases signal the relationship between the present message and the foregoing utterance and "have at least a component of meaning that resists truth condition treatment" (Levinson, 1983: 88).
Deborah Schiffrin (1987) defines discourse markers as linguistic elements that signal relations between units of talk, relations at the exchange, action, ideational, and participation framework levels of the discourse.
Redeker renames DMs as "discourse operators" and defines them as "linguistic signals of textual coherence links" (Redeker, 1991:1139). In her view, a discourse operator is "…a word or phrase…that is uttered with the primary function of bringing to the listener's attention a particular kind of linkage of upcoming utterance with the immediate discourse context" (Redeker, 1991:1168).
Hölker who studies French discourse markers put forwards four principles to identify a DM (1991: 78-79): 1) they do not affect the truth conditions of an utterance; 2) they do not add anything to the propositional content of an utterance; 3) they are related to the speech situation and not to the situation talked about; and 4) they have an emotive, expressive function rather than a referential, denotative, or cognitive function. The first two features are semantic in nature, the third is pragmatic and the fourth is functional (from Jucker and Ziv, 1998:3).
Blakemore (1992) calls DMs "discourse connectives". She focuses on how DMs impose constraints on implicatures and argues that DMs instruct the hearer to interpret the intended meaning of an utterance by indicating the direction to the search for relevance. In addition, she (1992) assumes that DMs do not have a representational meaning but have only a procedural meaning, which consists of instructions about how to manipulate the conceptual representation of the utterance.
Now let's look at Anderson's definition of pragmatic marker. He uses the term to refer to a group of minor linguistic elements at word level with the following properties: they are predominantly associated with (especially informal) spoken language; their function is to express pragmatic aspects of communication, for instance by marking propositional attitude or illocutionary force, or by signaling intratextual or interpersonal relations, and they do not contribute to the propositional content of the utterances in which they occur (Anderson, 1998).
Fraser, another famous scholar, defines DMs as "a class of lexical expressions drawn primarily from the syntactic classes of conjunctions, adverbs and prepositional phrases. With certain exceptions, they signal a relationship between the interpretation of the segment they introduce, S2, and the prior segment, S1. They have core meaning which is procedural, not conceptual, and their more specific interpretation is 'negotiated' by the context, both linguistic and conceptual" (Fraser, 1999: 831).
In a sum, besides "discourse markers", a variety of terms which have been used to describe the same or similar concepts are listed in Table 2.2.1-1.
The diversity of the terminology of DMs shows that different researchers have tried to define DMs from different perspectives. The typical characteristics of DMs at lexical, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic level allow us to arrive at the following definition: DMs are a group of short words and expressions drawn from classes of conjunctions, adverbials, prepositional phrases and other syntactic categories. They usually occur at the beginning of an utterance and have the function of marking the boundaries in the discourse. When taken away, they do not affect the grammaticality or the propositional contents of the discourse to which they are attached. They often help bring about the coherence of a discourse and facilitate the hearer's interpretation of the pragmatic meaning of the utterance.
2.2.2 An Overview of DM Studies at Home and Abroad
In 1953, Randolph Quirk gave a lecture where he first mentioned some frequently-used modifiers in daily communications such as you know, you see, and well. He points out that from the perspective of grammatical structure, these modifiers have no role in information delivery, but they are frequently used in verbal communication to smoothing the daily communications (cited in Huang Dawang, 2001: 5). Quirk's notion of "modifiers" and "signals" in conversations can be deemed as the initial description of discourse markers. During the period of 1950s and 1960s, scholars identified some distinctive features in oral communication, however, systematic studies on DMs had not been initiated until the 1970s.
Since the 1970s, the flourishing of discourse analysis and pragmatics promoted the development of DM studies. During the dawn period of DM studies, The credit for pioneering study on discourse markers should go to Robin Lakoff (1973). He gives a brief comparison between the different environments in which markers well and why occur and he also draws several conclusions for the two markers to appear under certain conditions. And his discussion is from the perspective of the appropriateness of questions and answers. Lakoff (ibid.: 464-465) states that well is used in case of an insufficiency in response, either by the respondent himself or by someone else. In this way it differs from why, which indicates that the question itself is not being asked in accordance with the rules. And he gives further generalization that the use of why, first, indicates surprise at an abnormal conversational situation and, second, denotes the presence of a fait accompli rather than leaving possibilities open. It is noticeable that his comments on marker why is rather brief.
Following Robin Lakoff, Halliday and Hasan (1976) have a much detailed description of these small words from the angle of cohesive relation. Interestingly they entitle the six items now, of course, well, anyway, surely and after all as continuatives.
Then in 1979, Van Dijk (1979: 447-456) presents a study of discourse markers as a linguistic entity in discussing the connectives and, but, or, so, and if. He makes a comparison between semantic connectives and pragmatic connectives. Semantic connectives express relations between denoted facts whereas pragmatic connectives express relations between speech acts.
Researches on discourse markers boomed since the 1980s, especially during the second half of the 1980s. The Journal of Pragmatics published a special issue in 1986 to introduce the studies on discourse markers (then the term being "particle") in various countries, and in 1990, it officially published a reference issue with "discourse markers" as its subject. Deborah Schiffrin's famous work Discourse Markers published in 1987 was universally acknowledged as the preface to the field of DMs study. The other monograph, Pragmatic expressions in English: a study of you know, you see and I mean in face-to-face conversation, written by Britt Erman in 1986, was also worthy of attention since it was the first systematic description of discourse markers on the basis of a large number of authentic conversations and dialogues extracted from a corpus.
Many famous scholars have put forward valuable theories from different perspectives on DMs since the second half of 1980s, including the coherence-based approach initiated by Deborah Shchiffrin (1987), the relevance-theoretical approach proposed by Diane Blakemore (1987, 1988, 1992, 1996, 2002), and the grammatical-pragmatic approach advocated by Fraser (1988, 1990, 1999), etc. In the next section, I will elaborate these representative theoretical approaches to DM studies.
Compared with the study of DMs abroad, researches on DMs in China is still at the starting stage. Not until the end of 1990s did researchers in China begin to pay their attention to the study of DMs. The representative scholars engaged in this field are Liao Qiuzhong (1986), Huang Dawang (2001), He Ziran (1999), Ran Yongping(2003), Feng Guangwu (2004), etc.
Like Blakemore, He Ziran and Ran Yongping (1999) also advocate for the study of DMs from the pragmatic point of view. Both of them believe that DMs help the production of the speaker's intention as well as the hearer's interpretation of an utterance. Ran Yongping is one of the most influential scholars with plentiful works in this field in recent years. He (Ran Yongping, 2003) studies the pragmatic functions of DM well in verbal interaction and claims that well can perform as a mitigator of the face-threatening act, as a hesitation or delay marker, as an insufficiency marker or a repairing marker according to its use in different contexts. In addition, he focuses his attention on DM you know and holds that it is used as an adaptive device helping to keep the interaction going. Wu Guoliang (2005) studies DM well with a focus on its pragmatic meaning and points out the influence of such a marker on translation.
Besides the studies on English DMs, Chinese scholars also have investigated certain Chinese discourse markers such as the interjections "好" (hao), "å§" (ba), "å•Š" (a), some phrases and word groups like "那么" (na me), "è¿™/那个" (zhe/na ge), and some frequently-used expressions like "è¿™æ ·çš„è¯â€¦â€¦" ("so/then/if it is so"), "æ•æˆ‘直言"("to be frank"), etc.
2.2.3 Major Research Approaches to DMs
There is still no consensus concerning a large number of definitions, functions and classifications of DMs by means of different research interests and focuses. Till now, approaches to the study of DMs have mainly fallen into three categories: the grammatical-pragmatic approach, the coherence-based approach and the relevance-theoretical approach.
2.2.3.1 Grammatical-pragmatic Approach
Zwicky (1985) is one of the earliest researchers that treat DMs from the grammatical-pragmatic perspective. Having studied the traditional word class that has been labeled "particle", Zwicky finds one grammatically significant class of items which are commonly used in the initial position of an utterance. Usually, they are prosodically independent and separated from their surrounding context by pauses or intonation breaks. Although Zwicky does not afford further evidence for what he holds to be DMs as a class in terms of distribution, prosody and meaning, he maintains that DMs should not be subsumed under the category of other functional words and therefore ought to be separated from them. In addition, he points out that DMs function pragmatically, having an important role to play in relating the current utterance with a large discourse or continuing the conversation.
Fraser (1999) is another scholar who also makes an attempt to approach DMs from grammatical-pragmatic point of view. Focusing on the grammatical characteristics of DMs, Fraser claims that DMs cannot be included in a single traditional class in the distribution and connective sense of the term. He considers DMs a group of expressions that frequently appear in the initial position of a sentence to continue the conversation and indicate different sorts of messages. One thing that has to be noted is that Fraser does not restrict himself to the study of DMs only from the grammatical point of view. He believes that DMs can be used to express a kind of logical relations and therefore contribute to the coherence of an utterance. In other words, Fraser not only studies DMs based on their syntactic properties, but also focuses on their important roles in discourse coherence. As regards the latter, it will be mentioned in the following section.
2.2.3.2 Coherence-theoretical Approach
Coherence-based approach to the study of DMs, focusing on how DMs bring about coherence of a discourse, gives much consideration to the coherent relations established by DMs. The basic assumption of this approach is that DMs are not comprised of random series of separated sentences, but usually form a coherent structure of units of varying size and nature (Risselada &Spooren, 1998). Among those researchers who study DMs based on coherence, the most well-known scholar is Schiffrin.
Schiffrin is considered to be one of the most influential researchers in this field throughout the 1980s. In her representative book entitled Discourse Markers, she discusses the functions and uses of eleven English DMs: oh, well, and, but, or, so, because, now, then, I mean, you know on the basis of quantitative and qualitative analysis as well. She shows great interest in the ways in which DMs function to "add to discourse coherence" (Schiffrin, 1987: 326) and argues that "coherence is constructed through relations between adjacent discourse unit" (Schiffrin, 1987: 24).
Schiffrin (1987: 6-12) proposes three properties of discourse markers: discourse forms structures, conveys meanings, and accomplishes actions. Then she puts forward a model of coherence in talk, focusing on local coherence, which includes five distinct and separate planes, each with its own type of coherence (Schiffrin, 1987: 24-25). And discourse markers are used on these different planes of talk.
Exchange structure, which reflects the mechanics of the conversational interchange and shows the results of the participant turn-taking and how these alternations are related to each other.
Action structure, which reflects the sequence of speech acts which occur within the discourse.
Ideational structure, which reflects certain relationships between the ideas found within the discourse, including cohesive relations, topic relations, and functional relations.
Participation framework, which reflects the ways in which speakers and hearers can relate to one another as well as orientation toward utterances.
Information state, which reflects the ongoing organization and management of knowledge and meta-knowledge as it evolves over the course of discourse.
Schiffrin suggests that DMs typically provide contextual coordinates for an utterance by: 1) locating the utterance on one or more planes of talk of her discourse model; 2) indexing the utterances to the speaker, the hearer, or both; and 3) indexing the utterances to prior and/or subsequent discourse (Schiffrin, 1987). In her view, DMs contribute to discourse coherence by establishing multiple contextual coordinates simultaneously, and facilitating the integration of various components of talk.
2.2.3.3 Relevance-theoretical approach
Diane Blakemore is the first researcher who approaches DMs from the perspective of Relevance Theory. Relevance theory, outlined by Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995), is a theory of communication based on cognitive principles. It considers utterances as providing inputs to inferential processes which affect the cognitive environment of the hearer. The inputs to these processes are assumptions, defined as "thoughts (conceptual representations) treated by the individual as representations of the actual world" (2). A hearer derives an intended set of assumptions by decoding the verbal stimuli and by means of a limited set of inferential processes. Fundamental in utterance interpretation is the principle of relevance addressed by Sperber and Wilson (158):
Every act of ostensive communication communicates a presumption of its own optimal relevance.
To say that an utterance is relevant amounts to saying that it achieves some kind of contextual effects. An assumption is relevant in a context if and only if it has some contextual effect in that context (122). An utterance can be more or less relevant depending on the strength of the contextual effects achieved and the processing costs required. The principle of relevance states that, by the very act of addressing someone, the speaker creates an expectation that the utterance will achieve enough contextual effects to be worth processing for the hearer and cause him no unnecessary processing effort. It is in the interest of the addressee that the communicator should choose the most relevant stimulus from a wide range of possible stimuli: that is, the one that will call for the least processing effort (157).
Blakemore (1992:136-137) states that according to a relevance-based framework, the hearer is always expected to interpret an utterance with the least amount of processing effort. To achieve the purpose, a speaker tends to constrain the hearer's choice of context by directing him to a particular set of assumptions in order to make sure his selection at minimal processing cost. Under this circumstance, the use of DMs appears naturally.
Blakemore (1992) holds that by using a DM, a speaker indicates how his utterance is to be interpreted as relevant. The hearer recognizes the intention, interprets the utterance in accordance with the meaning of such a DM and finally identifies one interpretation that satisfies the speaker's expectation of relevance. She emphasizes how DMs impose constraints on implicatures and maintains that DMs do not have a representational meaning, but have only a procedural meaning, which consists of instructions about how to manipulate the conceptual representation of the utterance (Blakemore, 1992).
These approaches to the study of DMs mentioned above allow us to see that different researchers hold different views on DMs. It is highly difficult to say which approach is superior to the others in explaining the nature of DMs. However, relevance theory, which views human communication from the perspective of cognitive processes and focuses on the ostensive-inferential role of human communication, provides a strong framework to explain the motivation for the employment of DMs that may not be explained by other theories in this field.
2.3 Studies of Functional Equivalence
One of the fundamental concepts in the translation theory is translation equivalence. Whether the target text can be regarded as equivalent to the source text is not a simple question about whether the two texts remain same in form. According to House (2006b), translation is a cross-linguistic-socio-cultural practice, in which a text in one language is replaced by a functionally equivalent text in another. Therefore, a translation is not only bound to the original text and culture, but also tightly connected with the communicative-linguistic conditions holding in the culture to which the addressees belong. This double bondage is the basis of translation equivalence. In a word, equivalence is never to be conceived as absolute but rather as inherently relative, emerging "from the context of situation as defined by the interplay of many different factors and has no existence outside that context" (Ivir, 1996: 155) (cited in House, 2006a: 63).
The equivalence theory, an important component of translation theory, can be said to be the central issue in translation studies. Equivalence theory, first embodied in Alexander Fraser Tytler's essay on the three principles of translation, was developed through Catford, Vinay and Darbelnet, Jakobson, Nida and Taber, Catford, House, Toury, and Baker, etc. Though there is no consensus over the definition and categories of translation equivalence, yet the scholars in this field seem to generally agree that equivalence can only be relative, determined by the unique characteristics of different language pairs per se.
According to Jakobson, "translation involves two equivalent messages in two different codes" (cited in Kenny, 1959: 233). Jakobson's theory is essentially based on his semiotic approach to translation according to which the translator has to first recode the ST information and transfer it into an equivalent message in the TT. This kind of claim is similar to Eugene A. Nida (1969)'s well-known notion of "dynamic equivalence", which was renamed as "functional equivalence" in the 1980s. Functional equivalence, the core of Nida's translation theory, had a great impact on translation studies in the 1960s and 1970s and was one of the theories which were introduced into China at an early time. In the eyes of Nida and Taber (1982), dynamic equivalence is defined as a translation principle according to which a translator seeks to translate the meaning of the original in such a way that the target-language wording will trigger the same effect on the target-culture audience as the original wording did on the ST audience. The priority of his functional equivalence theory is that the impact on the receptor of the translated version is equivalent to that of the original receptor of the source text.
It is important is the extent to which target receptors correctly understand and appreciate the translated texts. To be more specific, it is essential that functional equivalence be stated primarily in terms of a comparison of the way in which the readers of the target text understand and appreciate the TT and the way in which receptors or the readers of the source text understand and appreciate the ST (cited in Nida, 2006: 86).
However, Nida's "dynamic equivalence" is confined to the language pairs per se, thus somewhat ignorant of contextual factors of various kinds. House (1977) points out that every text is in itself placed within a particular situation which requires translator's identification, and that "a translation text should not only match its source text in function, but employ equivalent situational-dimensional means to achieve that function" (ibid. 49). In brief, House is in such a position to evaluate a translation that if the ST and TT differ substantially in terms of situational features, they are not functionally equivalent, and resultantly the translation is not of a high quality.
Here the word "function" in "functional equivalence" has certain particular implications: firstly, a text's function is to be defined pragmatically as the application or use of the text in a particular context (House, 2006b); secondly, the notion of "function equivalence" presupposes that there are elements in a text which, given appropriate tools, can reveal that text's function. Since appropriate use of language in communicative performance is what matters most in translation, it is functional equivalence that is of particular relevance for translation. And it is this kind of equivalence that underpins the systemic-functional model, a model that attempts to explicate the way meaning can be re-constituted across two different contexts. Three aspects of that meaning are particularly important for translation: a semantic, a pragmatic and a textual. Translation can then be defined as the replacement of a text in a source language by a semantically and pragmatically equivalent text in a target language.
In House's theory of translation, she assumes that the most important requirement for translation equivalence is that a translation have a function equivalent to that of its original. And "functional equivalence" can be established and evaluated by referring original and translation to the context of situation enveloping the two texts, and by examining the interplay of different contextual factors both reflected in the text and shaping it (House, 2006a: 63-64).
Furthermore, House (2006b) regards translation as an act of performance, of language use, which may well be conceptualized as a process of re-contextualization. Because in translating, stretches of language are not only given a new shape in a new language, but are also taken out of their earlier, original context and placed in a new context, with different values assigned to communicative conventions, genres, readers' expectation norms, etc. In her eyes, an adequate translation is a pragmatically and semantically equivalent one.
To sum up, "functional equivalence" is a dynamic and result-oriented concept describing a relationship of "equal" communicative values between ST and TT. In this context, "value" refers to meaning, including denotations, the stylistic connotations and the communicative effects.
