Pragmatic analysis of literary translation

Abstract A communicative theory of translation is based upon the theory of speech acts. The basic notion of speech act theory is a notion of an illocutionary force. An illocutionary force consists of seven components. When all these components in the illocutionary force are equal in the source language and the target language utterances, the illocutionary acts can be considered as equal in the two languages. The present article discusses a number of cases when illocutionary forces do not coincide. This may be due to, for instance, disregard for social relations between communicants in the text of translation, different communicative levels of interaction in the original and in the translation, incongruence between components of an illocutionary force in the source language and the target language, and so on.