A Stylistic Framework For Literary Translation Assessment

Literary stylistics, principally concerned with literary theme and esthetics, promisesa sensible model for literary translation assessment. Traditional translation criticismprioritizes esthetics in its theory building but shows a general lack of system andpracticality due to the vagueness of its terminology. In addition, its propensity fordiscussing the overall writerly style has been outgrown by the increasing complexity ofmodern-day literary themes and skills. Modern translation criticism, borrowing heavilyfrom one or many modern linguistic schools, affords a more workable system. But itoften fails to give due attention to esthetics, a natural result of its ambition to subject allgenres of discourse to its scrutiny. Modern stylistics has matured to make up wheretraditional esthetics and pure linguistically driven assessment models fall short. Thispaper attempts to construct an assessment model for literary translation, based onperspectives provided by traditional rhetoric, functional stylistics, cognitive stylistics andnarrative stylistics, which, combined, supposedly cover most, if not all, aspects thatliterary texts may touch upon. The model shall provide a comprehensive framework forassessing stylistic equivalence between the original and target languages on the ladderfrom phonetics, morphology, word, phrase, sentence and text. The stylistic equivalencemodel shall be dynamic and allow for linguistic and cultural discrepancies and gives fullconsideration to the disparity in theme-building and aesthetic features between differentliterary genres.The dissertation is structured as below.Chapter One: Introduction. This chapter gives a brief account of the importantthings---purpose, significance and major issues of the research as well as the stumblingblocks to be tackled.Chapter Two: A Brief Review of Stylistics. This chapter takes a snapshot of modernstylistics, often referred to as western stylistics, given its origin and the fact that most oftoday’s important stylistic theories and practices emerge from the west, as the disciplinebroke away from traditional rhetoric about a hundred years ago and has over the years gradually grown into the interdisciplinary academic edifice as it is, inspiring andproviding food of ideas for an increasing number of academic areas, translation studiesbeing a famous one.Chapter Three: A Brief Review of Theories and Practices of Literary TranslationAssessment. This chapter looks at both the traditional and modern perspectives for thepurpose and takes an especially careful glance at the stylistic approach.Chapter Four: Traditional Rhetoric and Literary Translation. This chapter discusseswith profuse details and examples what the traditional stylistic perspective, whichusually distinguishes itself from its modern counterpart by its impressionistic and thus“non-scientific” methodology, concerns itself with when it comes to the digging ofnuances of literary effects achieved by the play of linguistic forms. The revelations canhelp a translator better understand a given text as a reader, and go on to advise themabout their language choice as a writer.Chapter Five: Modern Stylistics and Literary Translation. In the same breath of theprevious chapter, chapter five goes on to explore what modern stylistics, empowered bymodern linguistics and thus a presumably improvement over the old practice, can informthe readers and translators in understanding a literary text. With an enhanced repertoireof interpretive weapons, as is revealed in the chapter, a text can be looked at from freshangles and surrender new subtleties that the impressionistic readers may have beenoblivious to or struck by with only elusive impressions. The chapter particularlydiscusses four stylistic approaches---functional stylistics, pragmatic stylistics, cognitivestylistics and narratologic stylistics, which supposedly cover most, if not all, grounds aliterary text often operates on.Chapter Six: Constructing a Stylistic Model for Literary Translation Assessment.Chapter six is the core of the model the research aspires to construct, which comes inthree parts. In part1, we extract from the previously discussed stylistic approaches avariety of stylistic parameters, which are positioned at various linguistic ranks andintegrated into a framework with a sense of wholeness. In part2we lay out the majorthings a reader shall look at in a literary text, and thus shall serve as signposts for the application of stylistic parameters. Part3stipulates the guidelines as well as proceduresby which a given work literary translation shall be assessed.Chapter Seven: Case Studies. This chapter works to apply the above model to fourpieces of literary work, and both proves the effectiveness and exposes the drawbacks ofthe model.Chapter Eight: Conclusion. The last chapter looks back at the major issuesaddressed in the research, sums up the shortcomings and mark out the areas where futureresearch endeavors shall be made in.