The Deceptive Equivalence In The Two English Versions Of Luotuo Xiangzi From The Perspective Of Stylistics

Luotuo Xiangzi is one of the most important masterpieces of Lao She.There are plenty of descriptions of Beijing dialect and local customs,which is a classic of modern vernacular novels.Lao She’s language is concise and expressive.However,due to the differences in Chinese and Western cultures,it is difficult for translators to achieve equivalence in content and form,leading to deceptive equivalence.This paper makes a contrastive study of the two English versions of Luotuo Xiangzi by Goldblatt and King.Previous scholars’ researchers mostly focused on Evan King’s translations,Goldblatt’s translation was published in 2010 with fewer researchers,and contrastive studies of Evan King’s and Goldblatt’s translations were even rarer in previous studies.In addition,from the perspective of literary stylistics,this paper makes an in-depth analysis of the deceptive equivalence in the English version of Goldblatt’s and Evan King’s by means of descriptive and contrastive analysis.The contrastive analysis is made on the dialects and emotion-containing words of the two versions.From the syntactic level,this paper analyzes the ways of dealing with repetition,dash,and rhythm in the two versions.From the perspective of speech and thought expression,this paper makes a contrastive study of the transference and direct speech in the two versions and then analyzes whether the effect of the two versions in expressing the theme meaning is similar to that of the original version,finally this paper draws a conclusion and summarizes the deficiencies.The above analysis shows that Evan King’s translation is closest to the original text,but some parts of the character description are translated too much,which deviates from the theme of the article.While Goldblatt’s translation is more literary and concise,which is in line with the characteristics of Lao She’s language that is easy to understand.However,the omitted translation of some sentences and the conversion of direct quotations make the sentences lose the beauty of the original text.In a word,translators should apply literary stylistics to the translation of novels to improve their stylistic awareness.Thus,the phenomenon of deceptive equivalence can be avoided to the greatest extent.In this way,the stylistic significance and aesthetic value of the original work can be better conveyed and expressed in the translation.