A Contrastive Study Of Translators’ Language Styles From The Perspective Of Foregrounding

Traditional translation theories universally hold that target text should be loyal to the original text and accordingly translators are always in a subordinate position. The appearance of deconstructionism urges people to change their shallow view of translators. Since then, translator’s status is promoted in translation and related studies on translators become more popular. Translator’s style is a combination of translator’s thinking and the language art in literary works, which comprises of literary thinking, art style and language style. This thesis mainly studies the language styles of translators, including their language forms and language features.Foregrounding theory is an important theory in stylistics. Foregrounding refers to the deviation from convention for artistic and thematic purposes so as to produce extraordinary literary effects. The foregrounding study method helps the explanation of language features in literary works and finally explores the literary effects achieved through such language features. The application fields of foregrounding in translation extend from fiction, prose to poetry and foregrounding usually investigates the phonological, lexical, syntactical and rhetorical elements in literary works and translations.Tao Yuanming’s poetry is famous both at home and abroad for his plain language and the vivid description of natural beauty. In this thesis, the researcher selects Wang Rongpei’s and Tans Shilin’s translations as the study examples, intends to study the similarities and disparities of two translators’ language styles from the perspective of foregrounding and finally investigates the literary effects brought by these language styles.Based on foregrounding theory, this thesis makes comparison and contrast of the language deviation and over-regularity in two translations, describes and analyzes the language features of these two translators. On one hand, the researcher finds out that Wang Rongpei mainly adopts over-regularity as an obvious stylistic feature. The rhyming patterns at the phonological level, repetitions at the lexical and syntactical levels and the antithesis structure at the rhetorical level in his translation are the reflection of his elegant and refined language style, which is an efficient way to realize the musical beauty and form beauty. On the other hand, the researcher gets to the conclusion that Tan Shilin mainly employs language deviation in his translation with casual and natural language patterns. The non-rhyming patterns at the phonological level and the repetitions at the lexical level are the reflection of translator’s plain language style. The inverted structure adopted at the syntactical level makes his translation lively and sprightly and the literary effect brought by his language style is reflected in the prominence of important information.