On Reproducing Colloquial Style Of The Catcher In The Rye In Chinese

This thesis attempts to investigate the reproduction of colloquial style involvedin two translations of an American masterpiece, The Catcher in the Rye, which waswritten by J.D. Salinger. Since one of the greatest characteristics of The Catcher in theRye is its colloquial style, this thesis seeks to explore some outstanding features ofcolloquial style in The Catcher in the Rye and its transference in the two Chinesetranslations respectively by Shi Xianrong and Sun Zhongxu, with a view toinvestigating each translator’s approaches in reproducing the colloquial style andexploring effective ways to preserve colloquial style in translations.The definition of style and translatability of style have been important issues inthe sphere of translation studies. In the first chapter of this thesis, the author holds thatstyle is translatable by reviewing a number of important concepts and notions whichhave contributed to stylistic translation studies. Next, Chapter2is concerned with areview of the definition of colloquial style and different aspects of such style revealedin the book. By drawing upon Liu Miqing’s theory of stylistic markers as the analysisframework, lexical markers, syntactic markers and markers of figure of speech arediscussed with an attempt to highlight systematically the features of colloquial style inThe Catcher in the Rye from different perspectives.The key part of the thesis is a comparative study of two Chinese versions inreproducing colloquial style from four aspects, namely, formality, intensiveness,openness and application of Chinese colloquial features. Below each aspect,comparative analyses of the most related items are made point by point, thusproviding a new approach and perspective for comparing colloquial style. During theprocess, the author also discusses the methods and strategies which are meant tomaintain colloquial style in translations.Besides, the thesis also investigates the limitations in translating colloquial style.The linguistic and cultural differences will limit or influence a translator’sreproduction of the original style. On the linguistic level, the phenomenon of “relaxed pronunciation words” is analyzed, and on the cultural level, the decoloring of somesensitive words in Shi Xianrong’s translation is explored.