A Study Of Zhang Guruo’s Translation Of Thomas Hardy’s Works:on Stylistic Features

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) was an outstanding British poet and playwright in19th century. His works depicted the social reality of economy, politics, moral and custom in Britain. Deeply influenced by Greek tragedies and the thought of German philosopher Schopenhauer, his works were full of criticism, fatalism and complex of tragedy. Among his works, the "Wessex" novels were the most famous series which was focused on the characteristics of the transitional time from19th to20th century.As a distinguished translator, Zhang Guruo spent all his life in teaching British literature and translation. He began to study and translate Hardy’s masterpieces in his youth. Since the1930s, he translated the three important novels of "Tess of the d’Urbervilles","Jude the Obscure" and "The Return of the Native". Deeply loved by Chinese readers, his versions were regarded as "models of translation" because they grasped the original author’s thoughts accurately, represented the style comprehensively, and transferred the writing techniques particularly. Therefore, he was honored as "expert of Thomas Hardy".Chapter one gives a brief introduction to the objects, purposes, main problems and expecting results of this paper.Chapter two is a brief review of the translation of Hardy’s works in China as well as research on Zhang’s translations and strategies by many famous translators.Chapter three introduces Zhang’s life experience, major translations and translation thoughts. Although he seldom stated his translation thoughts, he had a unique and profound understanding about translation. His translation thoughts mainly included:(1) Idiomatic translation for idiomatic original text;(2) Literature translation is both a science and an art. The study in this chapter is the preparation for the analysis of his translations of Hardy’s works in the following part.Chapter four discusses Hardy’s literary style and Zhang’s translation background. Meanwhile, it analyses reasons why Zhang chose Hardy’s works:the social mainstream ideology at that time and the translator’s life experience and personality.Chapter five is given to the specific analysis and study of Zhang’s three versions of "Tess of the d’Urbervilles","Jude the Obscure" and "The Return of the Native". Firstly, he reproduced the local color of Hardy’s works by employing dialect-for-dialect translation and representing the vulgarism in the original text. Meanwhile, he adopted four-character phrases and reduplicated words to translate the original works idiomatically. In addition, his fusion of scene and emotion, recreation of implicature and rebuilding the special atmosphere as a whole successfully recreated the artistic ideorealm of the original works. At the same time, his translation strategies gave a full play to his translation thoughts.In conclusion, the thesis summarizes Zhang’s translation thoughts and practices and their significance in the translation field.