A Study On The English Translation Of Speech And Thought Presentation In Bronze And Sunflower With Reference To Helen Wang’s Version

Cao Wenxuan,a writer of Chinese children’s literature,won the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 2016.His novel Bronze and Sunflower has received numerous awards and favorable receptions since its publication in China,popular among Chinese children and adults.Moreover,the English translation of Bronze and Sunflower has also attracted great attention and considerable sales overseas.And its translator Helen Wang won the Marsh Award for Children’s Literature in Translation.Therefore,based on Leach’s and Short’s classification of speech and thought presentation,this paper analyzes Helen Wang’s English translation of speech and thought presentation in Bronze and Sunflower from the perspective of narratology.The thesis aims to explore what changes on the presentation of speech and thought are made by the translator and evaluate whether the translation faithfully reproduce the narrative features of the original story.In the research process,this paper adopts the statistical method of manual marking to count the number of all kinds of speech and thought presentation in the source and target text.And it also adopts the research method of case study to analyze what changes on the presentation of speech and thought are made by the translator and evaluate whether the target text faithfully reproduce the translation and narrative effect of the original text.This paper is mainly to answer these two questions:(1)How did Helen Wang deal with the speech and thought presentation in the source text of Bronze and Sunflower?(2)What translation and narrative style is rendered by analyzing her translation of speech and thought presentation?Through this research,the author draws the following conclusions:First,the translator Helen Wang has made changes to the way of speech and thought presentation in the original text,and changed the narrative style of the original text.And she has a greater right to intervene and rewrite the original text to a higher degree.As for the translation of speech presentation,it can see that Helen Wang tends to directly present the characters’ words in a more realistic and vivid way.However,in the translation of thought presentation,it can conclude that Helen Wang are good at appreciating the inner thoughts of characters from the standpoint of onlookers and arousing emotional resonance with readers.Second,the translator Helen Wang tends to rewrite the text according to her own interpretation,taking environmental factors into account.Moreover,the translator tends to translate the text into short sentences with simple sentence structure,and there are many incomplete sentences in her translation.In addition,she focuses on the choice of words to appeal to western readers.Through the comparison between the Chinese and English versions of Bronze and Sunflower,it is found that speech and thought presentation in the Chinese novel is somewhat different from that in the translation.Therefore,the author explored the transformation ways and reasons in Chinese-English translation.Moreover,people have a certain understanding of Helen Wang’s translation and narrative style.However,this elementary conclusion needs to be verified by more researches.