时态推进的连贯功能与英汉翻译

Coherence Function of Tense Progression and Its Translation from English into Chinese

本文试图回答两个问题,一个是语言学问题,一个是翻译学问题。语言学问题是:时态的推进有没有语篇功能?某一类语言成分是否具有语篇功能关键是要看这些成分是否在语篇内能够相互发生联系,从而产生编织篇章结构的机制。这种谋篇机制或连贯性是靠这类语言成分在语篇内相互联系而形成的,从这一角度看,时态推进是具备这种功能的。由此而引出的翻译学问题是:对于没有语法时态的汉语来说,英语语篇用时态建构的连贯链如何在翻译时得到连贯的体现?这个结论并不难得出:汉语建构时间关系的手段是词汇和语序,因此这也正是译者用以应对英语时态连贯的翻译策略。但在这一过程中,作为汉语为母语的译者,受其语言习惯的干扰,常常会误读或误构原文的时态连贯。这正是两种不同的语言系统之间在交际过程中所产生的一种摩擦。

This paper tries to answer two questions,one concerning linguistics and the other Translation Studies.The linguistic one is: does tense progression have textual function? Whether one type of linguistic element can exert textual function depends on whether these elements can interrelate with each other and hence contribute to the configuration of a text.The texture or coherence so constructed is formed by the interrelationship between these elements in the text.In this sense,tense progression possesses such a function.Then the other question concerning Translation Studies is: since Chinese is a tenseless language in strict grammatical terms,how can the coherence of tense chain in an English text be coherently translated into Chinese? It is not difficult to conclude that since lexical and word-order means are the only means to construct temporal relations in Chinese,they are the only choice for the translator to tackle the English tenses.What matters is that,in this process,Chinese translators may suffer from their mother-tongue interference and hence mis-read or mis-construct the tense coherence.This is actually a conflict occurring in the communication between two different language systems.