Translation Strategies Of Scottish Dialects:A Case Study Of Robert Burns’ Narrative Poem Holy Fair

Dialect translation has always been one of the focuses and difficulties faced by Chinese and foreign translators.Proper translation strategies can bring the literary effects of dialects to the target readers and help them better understand the cultural connotation of dialects.Scholars divide the dialect translation into two aspects,namely the standardization strategy and non-standardization strategy.The non-standardized strategy is the mainstream of current dialect translation strategy and it advocates to translate the dialects into nonstandard language so as to retain the nature of the dialects and restore the original dialect text to the maximum extent.By a comparative study of Yuan Kejia and Wang Zuoliang’s translations of Holy Fair,this paper discusses the translation strategies of Scottish dialects.The translation strategies used by the two translators include the colloquial style,the elegant style,the vulgar style and annotation which highlight the effects of dialects and coincidentally fall into the non-standard translation strategies.Therefore,this paper studies the translation strategies of Scottish dialect from the above four aspects.In colloquial style,both of them translate the Scottish dialect into reduplicated words which make the translation more expressive;in terms of vulgar style,the expressiveness similar to the original dialect can be achieved through transformation of the part of speech.And both of them use elegant language style to depict characters so as to satire,expose or demonstrate the gap between the refined and the vulgar.Finally,different translation strategies used by Yuan Kejia and Wang Zuoliang reflect different translation concepts.Yuan’s translation is quite similar to the original poem in formal equivalence which presents a strong overall concept of translation.The emphasis of Wang’s translation is placed on reproducing the phonological characteristics of the original poem,emphasizing the artistic conception effect of the original text,which reflect his translation view of “translating poems by poetry and translating poems by poets”.The strategies used by Yuan Kejia could keep the sentence structure as neat as the original poem;Wang Zuoliang mainly adopts colloquial style and lays stress on the equivalence of the emotion with the original text.Although they adopt different translation strategies,both of them translate the Scottish dialect in a proper way.