A Study On The Retranslation Of David Copperfield From The Perspective Of Literary Stylistics

Charles Dickens was a great master of English literature in the 19^th century.During his lifetime,he wrote 14 novels,many short stories and essays,travel notes,plays,and sketches.David Copperfield,one of his masterpieces,enjoys a significant reputation in the history of world literature thanks to its ups and downs of plots and humorous language.This novel tells us that the orphan David Copperfield ultimately achieved career success and family happiness with his courage and perseverance.This novel is of great significance in shaping the personality of teenagers and now is one of the must-read classics for adolescents.David Copperfield has a 110-year history of retranslation in China.There are more than 280 Chinese translations,among which there are about 23 unabridged versions.Many scholars have studied the translation of David Copperfield from different perspectives and applied different theories.However,the theory of retranslation hypothesis has been seldom used in this field.The core content of the retranslation hypothesis is that the first translation always assimilates the original in the name of culture or magazine publishing needs,while the subsequent translations or retranslations are a return to the source text.That is to say,compared with the first translation,latter retranslations are closer to the source text and prefer to reproduce the stylistic features of the original text.Using the method of literary stylistics of Leech and Short,this thesis chose five Chinese versions of David Copperfield as corpus,analyzing which translation is closer to the source text to verify the validity of retranslation hypothesis.Five Chinese versions of David Copperfield selected in this thesis are respectively by Lin Shu and Wei Yi,Dong Qiusi,Zhang Guruo,Song Zhaolin,and Pan Hualing.This thesis makes a comparative analysis of them in terms of lexical level,rhetorical level and graphological level.Through the analysis,the author finds that,on the whole,compared with the first version,the subsequent four translations are much closer to the source text at above three levels,which can be regarded as the return to the source text.But the general tendency that each latter translation is closer and closer to the source text than the previous one can‘t be manifested in the latter four versions.Therefore,the retranslation hypothesis is generally valid,but some expressions in it are not scientific and precise due to the instability of subsequent versions.