国外翻译论文

Speech Acts and Illocutionary施为性

Function in Translation Methodology

SANDOR G. J. HERVEY

When ethologists studying the communicative behaviour of dolphins

attempt to render in English the messages that these, in all probability

Highly intelligent, animals exchange with one another in the course of their daily lives, they face a nigh-on insurmountable problem: translating

Messages from ‘dolphinese’presupposes that the content and the purport

Of the utterances of dolphins is neithrer entirely beneath, nor utterly beyond,A human conception of communicative acts. There is, in fact, no guarantee That grasping the nature of the pragmatics of dolphin communicative Performance is not totally outside the scope of human imagination.

For all that cross-linguistic translation (translation proper) is notoriously Problematic and fraught with difficulties, translators from English to German, Hungarian to French, Russian to Swahili, Chinese to Gujerati, and So on, at least do not face problems of such a magnitude as do

‘translators From dolphinese’. Though translation proper is a cross-cultural puzzle, and Scepticism about full translatability without distortion is, rightly, wide-Spread among those who theorise about translation, there is no chance that The performance of communicative acts in another human society, no Matter how strange and uncanny it may look at first sight when viewed From across a cultural boundary, could be beyond human imagining.

When human beings communicate, they perform acts that fall into the

Range of what other hunan beings, even those from vastly different cultural Backgrounds, are in principle capable of empathizing with. This presumption (and I stress that it is a presumption) defines the limits of a cautious ‘universalism’or, more precisely, an intellectual position between univerSalism and relativism. What members of one culture can be imagined by Members of another culture, even if they do otherwise.it is to this extent That human communication is ‘universal’.

Since the early work of Austin (1962), and subsequently of Searle (1969,979), the idea that utterances are forms of ‘doing’has become to all intents and purposes an

interdisciplinary commonplace. The view, spearheade

d By th

e notion o

f performative utterances (Austin, 1962), accordin

g to whic

h All utterances are means of performing intended actions has taken solid Hold in recent ‘pragmatic’approaches to semiotics (Parret, 1983), linguistics (Levinson, 1983; Brown & Levinson, 1978) –it has also made its influence Felt in anthropology (Gumperz, 1982) and, of course, in theory of translation (Hatim & Mason, 1990). The performative intention behind, and embedded

In, every utterance (in fact, every communicative act) is usually reified使具体化

Under the label of ‘illocutionary force’(Searle, 1969); that is, the illocutionary force of an utterance –its most salient pragmatic purpose – is the Performative intention which the utterance serves.

Since a discussion of illocutionary force entails an analytic appraisal of Supposed intentions judged by extemal functional criteria, I prefer to

Designate this performative aspect of utterances by the term illocutionary

Function. A cautious form of universalism would grant that the lllocutionary Function of every human act of communication is, in principle, knowable