Translating Defamiliarization In The Picture Of Dorian Gray

Russian formalists believe that the focus of literary research is the literariness of literary works,that is,the distinguishing features of literary texts from other texts,and literariness comes from the linguistic form of literary works.In Shklovsky’s opinion,defamiliarization breaks the inherent expression of language and distorts and deforms ordinary language,which is the key to endow works with artistic and aesthetic value.The purpose of art is to recall people’s sense of the known world.In order to break the automation of sensation and perception,things need to constantly appear in a new way.To increase the difficulty and time of perception,literary works often resort to defamiliarization to prolong readers’ reading process and bring freshness and unique aesthetic experience to them.Therefore,in the translation of literary works,how the translator treats and deals with the defamiliarization devises in the original text determines whether the translation can reproduce the aesthetic characteristics of the original.The Picture of Dorian Gray is the only novel written by Oscar Wilde,a British aesthete,which reveals the conflict between beauty and morality.Wilde’s language is concise,elegant and full of beauty.He uses rich defamiliarization devises in phonetics,diction and syntax,which greatly enhances the literariness of his work.Selecting Rong Rude’s translation published by Foreign Literature Press in 1982 as the research object,this paper analyzes whether Rong has noticed the application of defamiliarization during his translation and what kind of translationmethods have been used as well as what kind of translation effect has been achieved,and summarizes the translation strategies by which the defamiliarization are reproduced as well as the reasons for their loss.At the phonetic level,Wilde uses phonetic repetition and phonetic simulation a lot.Though Rong uses addition to convey the beauty of onomatopoeia,the sound effect of alliteration and end rhyme is not conveyed in the translation.At the lexical level,Wilde is good at using unusual collocation,loanword and lexical repetition to create the strange effect.However,in Rong’s translation,transferred epithet and the special linguistic phenomenon of multilingual hybrid is not reflected,so the aesthetic effect gets lost.At the syntactic level,there are such defamiliarization techniques as stretching the distance between sentence components,using parallel structures,inverting sentence structure and juxtaposing sentence components,but Rong has normalized them all and tends to adopt translation methods that cater to the reading habits of the target readers,which is a pity.By analyzing the defamiliarization techniques in The Picture of Dorian Gray and its translation,this paper aims to arouse the attention of scholars in the field of translation on this uncommon linguistic phenomenon,so as to seek better translation methods and strategies for the reproduction of defamiliarization effects and to improve the quality of literary translation.