A Report On The Translation Of A Wild Swan And Other Tales(Excerpt)from The Perspective Of The Theory Of Literary Stylistics

This report is based on the author’s experience in translating some of the stories in A Wild Swan and Other Tales.A Wild Swan and Other Tales is a short story collection of Michael Cunningham.All stories in the book are postmodern rewritings of iconic fairy tales.The author advances his individual interpretations of these fairy tales and demonstrates his refusal to obey the dominant ideologies supported by these original stories through striking postmodern characteristics-a complex narrative structure and various narrative techniques,such as irony,playfulness,and intertextuality.Since the text is characterized by postmodern style,this translation practice aims to reproduce the stylistic features and language style of the source text in the target text to the largest possible extent,so as to reproduce a similar effect for target readers.Literary stylistics is seen as a bridge connecting linguistics and literary criticism.It has the goal of explaining that linguistic choices of the author could highlight his or her unique aesthetics.The concept of deceptive equivalence is one of the most important concepts of Shen’s,which is used to revise the translation.This report contains five parts.Chapter one serves as a general introduction of the project and the significance of the report.Chapter two introduces Cunningham,the author of the source text,and gives a minute description of the characteristics of the stories in the source text.The third chapter gives a detailed description of some key concepts:foregrounding;speech and thought presentation;and point of view.This chapter also covers a review of the relationship between stylistics and translation.The concepts mentioned in this chapter are used as the main guidance in the whole process of the practice and case analysis.In chapter four,the author of this report presents the stylistic analysis of the translation through some specific cases she came across in the practice.These cases are divided into four parts:lexical level,syntactic level,discoursal level and the aspect of rhetoric.The last chapter is the conclusion of the whole report.Major findings and limitations are summarised in this part.This report shows that stylistics is a reliable theory for the translator to observe the subtle stylistic features in the source text and avoid impressionistic translation,so as to achieve functional equivalence.This report also gives a picture for future translation studies of postmodern rewritings of fairy tales through typical case analysis.