On Point Of View In The Waves And Its Representation In Three Chinese Translations

After Jacob’s Room,Mrs.Dalloway,and To the Lighthouse,Woolf pushed her literary formal experiment to a new height in The Waves.This is a highly stylistic,formulaic and experimental work.The use of such dramatic forms as soliloquy and interlude brings to this work a distinctive structure,the essence of which is a complex and oblique point of view,which not only functions to portray the characters and advance the story,but also serves to build a meditative,lyrical yet restless ambience.Point of view,as a narrative technique,has become the object of more and more researches from the scholars in the fields of narratology,stylistics,linguists etc.,and around it a comparatively systematic research framework on the basis of linguistics has been established.This thesis,guided by the theoretical and linguistic framework constructed by Simpson,conducts research on the point of view in The Waves in terms of the related linguistic markers of deixis,modality and transitivity,as well as in terms of speech and thought presentation,and makes a contrastive analysis of these linguistic markers in the source text and the Chinese translations.Informed by the related research on the point of view of The Waves between the English original and the French translations by Bosseaux,who limited the scope of investigation to a dozen of words related to deixis,modality,transitivity,and via the use of corpus compared the expressions that contain these words in the original text and the French translations,this thesis is based on the contrastive analysis of the excerpts sorted out by checking the use of such words as ‘should’,‘must’,‘shut’,and on the manual comparison of these uses in the English original and Chinese translations to see how the translators represented the original point of view in translating these linguistic markers,how their representations caused shifts on the point of view,and what resulted from these shifts.The conclusions are: in spite of the linguistic structural differences between English and Chinese and the different linguistic habits of the two peoples,in the excerpts investigated and not limited to the listed in this thesis,the expressions related to the linguistic markers of point of view should be translated in a literal way so as to better represent the stylistic traits of The Waves as an English modernist novel without costing the fluency and naturalness of Chinese expression or changing the way in which the translation impresses its implied reader from that the original does its reader.