Style Translation Of Imperfect Understanding: From The Perspective Of Markedness Theory

Wen Yuanning was an one-time figure during the Republic of China period(1912-1949),he was also remembered by later generations for being the teacher of literary master Qian Zhongshu.Skilled in a number of foreign languages,this man had been the professor of English literature in several top universities in China.He was also regarded as the “first person who introduced E.T.Eliot to China”.Imperfect Understanding was the only work Wen Yuanning left to the world.Written in English,the book was a collection of essays depicting celebrities in the Republic of China.It includes tens of personal sketches of that time and most articles inside are written in the way of verbal sketch.Humorously and implicitly,Wen shows his admiring or ironical attitude toward the heroes through detailed description such as the appearance,the personality,the individual behavior and the life philosophy of the people being described.Besides,lots of famous remarks of different languages are also skillfully used in the book.All this makes it a book of high readability.However,researches about the book are insufficient in current literary world due to various reasons.In view of this,the thesis chooses the latest version of Jiang Feng’s translation as the research object.Based on Liu Miqing’s Markedness Theory,this thesis presents a detailed and extensive analysis of Imperfect Understanding and its translation from the perspectives of formal and the non-formal markers.The thesis’ s main aim is to find out the main stylistic features of the original text,and subsequently discuss whether the style is reproduced in its translation.Analysis shows that stylistic markers of the original work are obvious in various of aspects such as lexical,syntactic,textual and figures of the speech.Besides,Jiang Feng’s translation has generally reproduced the style of the original,and the interestingness and the readability of the translation are basically equal to that of the original work.Meanwhile,some enlightenment has been drawn out: First,stylistic markers are the strong evidences of finding the style of a work,and translators shouldfirst find out the original style according to stylistic markers in order to better reproduce it in the translation.Secondly,personal factors of the author have a significant impact on the style of his work,so taking these factors into consideration would be more helpful for analyzing the style of the work.Thirdly,serious attitude to and thorough understanding of the original work are the precondition of a good translation.Being the very first thesis focus on Imperfect Understanding,this thesis is expected to inspire more deeper researches on this book and its translation.