A Study Of Double Meaning In The Scarlet Letter And Its Translations

The Scarlet Letter, a masterpiece of the prominent Romantic novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne in 19^th century, plays a significant role in the history of American literature for its perfect harmony in both art and thought. Though the novel was introduced to China early and it has many translations so far, the study on different translations seems to be rare, even less the translation study on its language characteristics. One of the remarkable language features in The Scarlet Letter is duality or double meaning, which means that there is a meaning in depth beyond the superficial meaning, or a special content beyond the form. In the book, the duality embodied in the semantic, pragmatic and syntactic respects . Moreover, in translating, it is difficult to combine the meaning both in surface and in depth and connect the form and content. Therefore, this thesis is to discuss how to rebuild the language duality in translating The Scarlet Letter, from the semantic, pragmatic and syntactic aspects.This thesis consists of three chapters. Chapter One, mainly concerned with the translation of duality at the semantic level, analyses how to represent the author's ambiguous intentions, which include author's hidden purpose, double attitude and symbolization. The translation of duality at the pragmatic level is discussed in Chapter Two, which dwells on three types of conversational implication: double discourse orientation, discourse overtone, and covert cohesion in discourse. Chapter Three explores the translation of duality at the syntactic level, namely, representation of significant form. The syntactical problem in The Scarlet Letter is discussed in three ways: the opening of a sentence bears emotional meanings, segmentation stylistic meanings, and sequence aesthetic meanings.By comparing different translations, some translation strategies are summarized in the thesis. In order to represent the duality at the semantic level, translator could select the neutral words or affective words, and convert noun phrases to adjectives. As for rebuilding duality at the pragmatic level, translator could blur the meaning, improve the contextual effects, keep the foregrounded cohesion, and reconstruct the discourse. The best way to represent the duality at the syntactic level is via formal resemblance: the opening, segmentation or the sequence of the sentences are suggested to be kept exactly the same as the original text. In this way, another layer of meanings could be conveyed in the translation.