Translation Strategies Of Chinese Reduplicated Adjective

Reduplication, as a kind of significant and typical form of words, can be observed inChinese in large numbers. And the adjectives in Chinese have the richest forms ofreduplication and are most widely used. The reduplicated adjectives in Chinese achievethe effect of combining sound, form and meaning into one organic whole, which made theword vivid in meaning, rhythmical in sound and full of penetrating power in conveying theauthor’s thoughts and feelings. While reading, it seems that readers can hear the sound, seethe image and taste the flavor of these expressive and artistic words.The earlier researches on reduplicated adjectives mainly discussed the forms,grammatical meanings, functions and rhetorical features from diachronic or synchronicperspective. There are also many scholars specialized in one special type of adjectivereduplication. However, fewer theses can be found, which studied the translation ofreduplication, not mention the adjective reduplication. And the researches merely listedscattered sentences as the examples instead of giving a comprehensive and systematicstudy of a certain work or monograph. Based on the above remarks, this thesis resorts toanalyze and study the English translation of reduplicated adjective in Eileen Chang’snovels, arriving at general translation strategies of Chinese reduplicated adjective.The novels in which this thesis studied are written by Eileen Chang, concludingSealed off, Jasmine Tea, Love in a Fallen City, Aloeswood Incense: The First Brazier, andRed Rose, White Rose which are considered as her most successful works. The reasonswhy we choose Eileen Chang mainly lie in three aspects. First, as a distinguished writer inChina modern literature, Eileen Chang attracted immediate attention of the critics as earlyas her first appearance in the literary circle. Secondly, the reduplicated adjectives areemerged in an endless stream in her novels to express people’s feelings, and describe background scenes or circumstances. Thirdly, researchers home and abroad make closerexaminations of Eileen Chang and her writings from cultural, psychological and languagestyle perspectives and her achievements as a translator as well. However, no paper touchesupon the English translation of Chinese reduplicated adjective in her literary works.Literary translation has a close relationship with aesthetics in Chinese traditionaltranslation theories. Xu Yuanchong put up with“Three Beauties”principle, referring tobeauty in meaning, beauty in sound and beauty in form in the translation of Chineseclassical poetry. Beauty in meaning suggests that the translator should translate not onlythe superficial meaning but the deep sense of the text as well. Beauty in sound means thatthe translator should make every possible means to recreate rhyme, rhythm and alliterationof the original. Beauty in form means that the translator should not only focus on thevisual beauty of characters but arrangements of discourses as well. As for the relationshipbetween the three beauties, Xu Yuanchong also points out that beauty in meaning is themost important followed by beauty in sound and then beauty in form. Chinese adjectivereduplication is just one typical example of“Three Beauties”principle.Due to the differences between Chinese and English, especially the limited andinadequate reduplication in English, in most situations, we have to abandon equivalentforms in order to preserve the original meaning and find a closest and relatively equivalenttranslation in English. What’s more, Xu Yuanchong’s“Three Beauties”principle doesn’tanswer the question how to evaluate whether a translation is faithful to the target readersor not. On the contrary, functional equivalence requires not only the faithfulness to sourcemessage but native and natural expressions in target language as well. And translatorshave to adjust the form of source language under the precondition of keeping the semanticequivalence, which makes dynamic equivalence allows a wide range of diversity intranslating. In the light of functional equivalence, translators have to restructure the formin order to preserve and transfer the meaning of source text and choose a proximalequivalent expression in target language.Therefore, under the guiding of Xu Yuanchong’s“Three Beauties”principle andfunctional equivalence theory, this thesis attempts to make out the general translationstrategies of Chinese reduplicated adjectives by analyzing and researching the translationof reduplicated adjectives in Eileen Chang’s novels, meanwhile with the expectation toprovide some enlightenment to English-Chinese translation of reduplicated words and thefield of teaching Chinese as a foreign language as well. However, we should realize that this thesis only focuses on the translation of reduplicated adjective in literary writings andthe data we have collected and researched are very limited. The translation strategies ofreduplicated adjective we put forward may not be suitable for popular songs or other typesof literary work. And Chinese reduplication can appear in all word class, we only discussthe adjective reduplication, the future study may step into the translation of reduplicationin other types of literature or reduplication in other word classes.