A Comparative Study Of The Two Chinese Versions Of Jane Eyre

Since its publication in 1947, Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte's best literary production, has been considered one of the most popular of all English novels. In this novel, Charlotte Bronte displays a marvelous talent in language by her flexible use of various linguistic devices. All such semantic and stylistic features, like the original diction with rich cultural information, diverse syntactic structures and elegant language, distinguish the novel from others and meanwhile pose great difficulty in the process of translating from English into Chinese. Therefore, the study of the Chinese versions of Jane Eyre will be of great values to the study of literary translation.Firstly, according to the translating principles of semantic equivalence and stylistic equivalence, this dissertation makes a systematic and detailed comparison of the two Chinese versions of Jane Eyre, which are translated by Zhu Qingying and Huang Yuanshen respectively. The translation critique goes forward from two aspects: meaning transference and style transference.During the comparison of meaning transference, this dissertation combines Mr. Liu Miqing's definition and classification of meaning with some semantic and pragmatic theories to evaluate whether the types of meanings are transferred in the two translations and to discuss the importance of semantic analysis in literary translation.As to the transference of the style, this dissertation compares the two versions from two aspects — reproduction of the narrative language and reproduction of the language characteristics of the dialogues, since in fiction there is always a contrast between the styles of narrative language—the language the writer uses to tell the story, and of conversational language—the language the characters use in their dialogues.Secondly, the translation methods adopted by the two translators are compared. All translators, whether consciously or unconsciously, would base their work on certain principles of translation. Under the guidance of these principles, translators decide what they should do and how the translation should be done. A careful study of the translators' principles will help usexamine their translations. Thus the two different methods adopted by the two translators will be compared according to two different translation methods, that is foreignization and domestication.Through the comparison, the present author finds that the two translators make use of two different means to handle certain linguistic phenomena, and in the end the two translations have different effects on the readers. Literary translation is a kind of re-creation. The highest level of literary translation is to achieve the closest natural equivalence in meaning and style. Although absolute equivalence is impossible because of the differences between English and Chinese, the closest natural equivalent translation is the aim that translators must seek.