Deceptive Equivalence And The Translation Of Literariness From The Perspective Of Defamiliarization

Deceptive equivalence (hereafter shortened as DE) is a concept carried out byShen Dan in Literary Stylistics and Fictional Translation. It refers to the phenomenonin literary translation that “the translators convey approximately the same fictional‘facts’ but failing to capture the aesthetic effects generated by the original author’sformal operations”. From the aspect of Formalism, it is the literariness---things makea certain text literature---that distinguishes literary works from other texts.Fundamentally, literariness is acquired by writers’ innovation over traditionallanguages and making them poetic languages, which are in fact the basic elements ofa literary work. In another word, aesthetic value inside a literary work reflects onthose defamiliarized language forms---poetic languages. Thus, proper handling ofdefamiliarized language forms to a large extent determines the literary quality of atranslation.A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is the first novel of James Joyce.Compared with its contemporaries, it is innovative in the narrative style and thelanguage form. It has several translations and quite an amount of researches in China.But researches over it were mostly focused upon the English version itself. Few were about the translation of defamiliarization, which is in fact significant for the criterionand criticism of literary translation. This thesis chooses two popular Chinese versionsand selects from them some examples respectively on the phonetic, lexical, syntacticand discourse level in which defamiliarization devices are improperly handled,resulting in deceptive equivalence. Reasons are also analyzed and strategies are alsosuggested. According to this thesis, there are mainly two reasons leading to deceptiveequivalence. Objectively, there are irreconcilable divergences between the twolanguages. Subjectively, translators are inclined to be information orientated andnormalize those defamiliarized forms when translating, which make them conflictwith the original writer’s aesthetic orientation. This thesis also summarizes anddiscusses some translation techniques in the reproduction of defamiliarization deviceson the basis of both homogeneity and heterogeneity from literary and linguistic aspect.According to the thesis, when the target language has similar literary environment andlanguage form with the original language, formal equivalence is advisable. On theother hand, when the target language is different from the original language in itsliterary environment and language forms, it is advisable to break the form and try to acquire functional equivalence by analogy, notation and imitation to achieve similareffects.