On The Translation Of Wuhan Dialect In Chi Li’s Novels

As a representative writer of new realism school in China,Chi Li has been committed to describing social landscape of Wuhan in plain language.One of the distinctive features of her novels is the extensive use of Wuhan dialect,which fully demonstrates the regional cultural characteristics of Wuhan.As early as the 1990 s,the Panda Book launched the translation of Chi Li’s works,Apart from Love,which marked the beginning for her work to go overseas.However,research on the English translation of Wuhan dialect in her novels has been relatively scarce.As a kind of language variation,dialect is closely related to the social context and the social identity of the speaker.With Hot or Cold,It’s Good to Be Alive,Sunrise,Apart from Love,Trails and Tabulations as the corpus,and Janet Holmes’ analytical framework in sociolinguistics,the author will analyze the predominant factors affecting language variation from two aspects: use-oriented variation and user-oriented variation.Use-oriented variation covers linguistic function,register and cultural factors,to be more specific,feint offense,politeness and food culture from the addressing term in Wuhan dialect.User-oriented variation revolves around the age and gender of the speaker,and how disparity in age and female identity affect the linguistic choices of the speaker.The following questions will be answered in this thesis: What specific translation strategy did the translator adopt? Does the translation demonstrate the influence of the above factors on the linguistic choices,or is any compensation adopted?Is it possible to make any improvement for the translation?It is demanding to adopt equivalent translation for Wuhan dialect,and rendering it in the standard language literally is a shortcut,but it will hinder the transferring of vernacular characteristics.If taking linguistic function,register,cultural factors and the gender and age of the speaker into account,and adopt the strategies such as phonetic deviation,visual deviation,lexical deviation and syntactic deviation,the regional color can be somewhat compensated.