On The First Chinese Translation Of Alice's Adventures In Wonderland-From The Perspective Of Literary Stylistics

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, a well-known work by the British writer L. Carroll, is regarded as one of the classics among children's literature. As soon as the book was published, it gained massive popularity among children and adult readers. By the middle of the 19th century, it had been republished for over 300 times. The popularity is just next to the Bible and Shakespeare's work in Britain (杨实诚, 1989). In the Encyclopedia Britannica, the book is praised as the zenith of nonsense or fantastic literature and its publication represents the coming of the golden age of English children's literature. This book is full of puns, parodies, as well as other word plays, humorous exaggerations and ridiculous situations, which all add difficulty to the translation of the book. As a matter of fact, since the first Chinese translation of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland came out in 1922, it is not until the 1980s that other Chinese versions then appeared gradually.Chao Yuen Ren is the first translator who introduces the Alice book into China. His translation of the book has achieved great success since it got published.The present thesis makes an analysis and evaluations on this famous work and its first Chinese translation from the perspective of literary stylistics.As far as the definition of style is concerned, different scholars may have different interpretations. Scholars such as Cuddon, Savory, Leech and Short have all given their own definitions, which are more or less different, while Swift concluded concisely that "Proper words in proper places make the true definition of a style".Since "style" does exist, there is research on the subject, hence stylistics comes into being. In short, stylistics is an attempt to put literary criticism on a scientific basis. When it comes to the criticism of literature, critics have to be aware of the relation between language and artistic value. They need to relate their concern of aesthetic appreciation with the linguist's concern of linguistic description. And literary stylistics is concerned with literary language and explains the relationship between style and literary or aesthetic function. It is a discipline mediating between literary criticism and linguistics at differentlevels and in various forms. In this discipline, the emphasis falls both on the explicitness or precision of the linguistic description and on the resultant literary effects.In the present thesis, the author applies literary stylistics to the translation of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and gives a detailed analysis on Chao's version. The discussion is focused on the reproduction of the stylistic features from the original to the target text, which involves five aspects: alliteration, rhyme, pun, parody, and deviation. In each aspect, examples are given to illustrate the author's viewpoints. There are successful as well as unsuccessful examples of translation. In all, the success outweighs the failure.Through the detailed analysis, the author comes to the conclusion that in translating Alices Adventures in Wonderland, the translator Chao Yuen Ren is fully aware of the thematic and artistic effects manifested by the above-mentioned features and reproduces the effects successfully in his version. That's why Chao's version can still be regarded as a masterpiece after four decades, though a few places have some room for improvement.