A Report On The Translation Of Foregrounded Language In Historical Novel From The Perspective Of Literary Stylistics

As an important sub-branch of the novel,the historical novel contains rich historical and cultural information.Based on historical facts,the author makes up some characters or plots to reproduce the social conditions of a certain period.In view of its literary,historical and cultural significance,it is worth further studying and discussing.Based on the historical novel Where the Sky Begins written by British writer Rhys Bowen,the author chooses Chapters 3 to 6 of the novel for translation to explore how to reproduce the foregrounded language from the perspective of literary stylistics.Bowen has authored more than 40 novels,specializing in historical novels and suspense novels,many of which have been listed as best-selling books by The New York Times.Her works have won multiple awards,including the Macavity Awards,and the Agatha Award,and been nominated for the Edgar Allan Poe Award.Literary stylistics believes that the content and form of literary works are interdependent,and the language form itself contains the aesthetic value,which plays an essential role in conveying the author’s intention and thematic significance.On this basis,novel translation is not only about the reproduction of the plot,but also about maintaining the formal characteristics and aesthetic effects of the original work.Foregrounding,a crucial concept in literary stylistics,is the deviation of linguistic conventions in writing.The standard language recedes into the background while the deviation is brought to the foreground.Foregrounded language can attract readers’ attention and convey the author’s writing intention and ideas.Therefore,translators should spare no efforts to capture the foregrounded language in the original text and use a variety of translation strategies to accurately represent the contrasts between the deviation and the standard language.Based on the categorization of Leech and Short,the translator divides the foregrounding contained in translation materials into qualitative and quantitative foregrounding.Qualitative foregrounding can be divided into lexical,grammatical,semantic deviation and deviation of the historical period;quantitative foregrounding can be divided into repetition and parallelism.The translator mainly adopts literal translation to reproduce foregrounding.For qualitative foregrounding,the translator also adopts free translation,transliteration,paraphrase,amplification,creative translation,division,and annotation;for quantitative foregrounding,free translation and conversion are harnessed.This thesis studies the translation strategies that can be adopted to translate foregrounding in historical novels to better convey the author’s intention and the literary effect of the source text.Hopefully,this thesis can enrich relevant case studies and be a reference for the E-C translation of foregrounding.