| Ernest Hemingway is a great American writer of the twentieth century with a high artistic gift and distinguished artistic features who belongs neither to traditional realism or romanticism, nor to any of the modernist schools, but rather, by taking the advantage of all other schools, forms a unique style of his own, i.e. "the Hemingway style", thus becoming a stylized writer recognized throughout the world. Because of this unique style, Hemingway's literary works were once so popular that they were translated into almost all major languages in the world, including Chinese. Today a lot of his works are still much liked by a huge number of literary lovers in China. His masterpiece The Old Man and the Sea, in particular, has enjoyed such a long lasting popularity in China that there have appeared more than 30 different translated versions in Chinese since it came into being in the 1950s, and some of them are still being reprinted today. To match with this prosperity in translation and publication, studies on Hemingway and his literary works have also been florishing in China. A survey of the database of CNKI produces more than 4000 research papers related to Hemingway up to now, which well illustrates the florishment of Hemingway study in China. However, unlike the unprecedented prosperity of the publication of and study on Hemingway, researches on his style of literary creation are still rare to see. According to a statistics the author made by searching with "Hemingway style" as the key word in the database of CNKI, only 6 of the 16 related items are found to be specifically attributed to studies on "Hemingway style".On account of the above elements, the author of this dissertation particularly chooses The Old Man and the Sea and its five translated Chinese versions as the study object with an intention to initiate some elementary explorations to draw the attention of the translation circle in China to the representation of the "Hemingway style" in the process of translating Hemingway into Chinese.With the related English and Chinese textual analysis softwares, under the guidance of the Stylistic Markers Theory by Liu Miqing, this research makes a case study of the source text of The Old Man and the Sea and its five corresponding Chinese translations, with the aim of displaying the specifications of the "Hemingway style" existing on various language levels, and examining how the five translators represent the "Hemingway style" in their respective translations of the novel.On the whole the dissertation is composed of five chapters. Next we will examine the specific contents of each of them:Chaper One makes, first of all, a brief review of the major literary theories on style, with a focus on the definitions and the significances of literary style, and then introduces de Buffon's style theory and the literary theory of the Russian formalists. Looking back into the long river of literary history both home and abroad, we find that style researchers have long appeared since ancient times. Though in different terms, their definitions of style are mostly similar in essence and could be classified into two categories: the "thought-oriented" category and the "rhetoric-oriented" category.The "thought-oriented" researchers maintain that style is the reflection of the writer's creative personality in his writings. It is, therefore, often regarded as a symbol of maturity of the writer, and as an important means by which readers can come to recognize writers from one another. In this sense, we can say that style is the mirror of a writer's personal features. A writer with unique stylistic features could be easily recognized by his readers even though his information is taken out from the text. This viewpoint is testified by the famous quote of the 18th century French scholar de Buffon which reads "Le style, c'est l'homme", and which is also recognized by influential historical figures like Hegal and Karl Marx, etc. and is echoed by sayings in ancient Chinese literary theories, like "The taste of literature is just the taste of the writer's personality", and "Writing is like the man", etc. All the above elaborations expressed one same idea, i.e. literay style is deeply rooted in the writer's subjective personality training, which is often reflected in the writer's literary compositions. So, the type of writer makes the type of writings, and the type of personality basis produces the type of taste, interest and style. Style is not only rooted in the basis of interior personality, it is also represented through objective, physical forms and images in the exterior. Without these exterior forms and images, literary style, which is an organic unity of both subjectivity and objectivity, can still hardly be realized. The exterior forms and images, however, also have their interior laws and regularities. To form his own style, an important thing a writer must do is to adapt to and fit in the objective artistic mechanism. This viewpoint is well illustrated by German scholar Wignat who compared the relationship of the subjectiveness and objectiveness of style as the relationship of clothes and the human body.The "rhetoric-oriented" researchers, on the other hand, hold that style is literary characteristics displayed in rhetorical forms. Aristotle mainly discusses stylistic issues within the category of rhetorics. Visvanathan in ancient India proposes that style is but the special forms of connecting words into sentences. Ancient Chinese literay theories also often categorizes literary styles by way of rhetorical forms.The author argues that style is an indispensable integration of content and form. While we stress on the role of contents in style, we should rule out the value of the forms. In effect, style is a coordinating organic integration of subjectivity and objectivity, and of content and form, resulted from the materialization of a writer's uniqueness in writing.It is generally agreed that the realization of style must meet the following three major conditions: First, it should be initiative, and become a certain start point which will in the future exercise powerful influence on literay fashion. Second, the personal features must be clear and distinct rather than fuzzy and ambiguious, and could be recognized by people at first glance without reconsideration. Third, the personal features must sustain a relative steadiness and could be found in a series of the writer's literary works. In literary creation, style is a higher, or even the highest requirement of a writer. A writer can hardly be said to have a style of his own if the above three conditions could not be satisfied.Style appreciation is a high level of literary criticism. Tong Qingbing says that "'what to write' and 'how to write' are two different issues. If literary review cares only 'what to write', and only makes comments on 'what to write', then it cannot be called real literary criticism. Strictly speaking, it is at most moral, historical, or social discussions only, and has not entered the gate of literary criticism at all. Real literary criticsm must make a thorough study of the style of the text." Tong's viewpoint well illustrates that criticsm and appreciation of literary style is of great significance. Similarly, in the field of literary translation, "how to translate" should also become a subject matter that requires our intense care. The criticism and appreciation of style translation is also of great significance.The Russian Formalism is a school of literary criticism appearing from 1914 to 1939 in Russia. It is made up of two branches, i.e. the "Moscow Linguistics Group" represented by Jakobson and the "St. Petersburg Group" (Opayaz) represented by Shklovsky, who mainly studies literature from the angle of linguistics, and who advocates that literary . studies should try to find its own peculiarity and regularity by studying the language, strucutre and style of the text itself. The Formalists think that the aim of literary study is "literary for literary's sake" and the crux of literary criticism is the "literariness", i.e. the forms and structures of literature, especially the rhetoric and linguistic style of the literary works. They think that the ultimate purpose of literay creation is in the process of appreciating beauty instead of the beauty itself. In order to lengthen the process and to strengthen the effect of aesthetic appreciation, they proposes and promotes "enstrangement" in literary creation in the hope of liberating people from traditional way of cognition, and enabling them to fully perceive the target of aesthetic appreciation with a brand new eyesight. With the help of linguistics theories and methods, literary studies can focus the research on the interior study of the literary works. This form-oriented study of literature can therefore better analyze the structure of the literary works and produce a better understanding of the extraordinariness of literature. This literary view upheld by the Formalists provides us an important theoretical basis to focus in our translation studies on the representation of the artistic style stemed from the language forms of the literary works.Chapter Two gives a review of various translation theories of literary style both at home and abroad, in the ancient times as well as in the modern society, with a focus on European viewpoints on style translation since Cicero down in foreign countries, and on domestic style translation theories like Liu Zhongde's "Xin, Da, Qie" translation principle and Liu Miqing's Stylistic Markers Theory. Translation and communication were very active in ancient Europe and there had long since appeared discussions on translation standards. Unlike the situation in ancient China, the Europeans included the topic of style translation from the very beginning and made it one of the everlasting focuses of their arguments and discussions over translation issues. It is generally acknowledged that Marcus Cicero was the first in the West to uphold the banner of "style translation" who stressed on the forms of expressions of the source text and on the retainment of the style formed by them while paying attention to the accurate transferrence of content in translation. St Jerome regarded style as an indispensable part of content and proposed the transplantation of style of the source text according to the features of the target language. St. Augustine on the other hand stressed the adjustment of the style of the translation to suit the target readers and proposed a flexible application of the plain, elegant and solemn styles in translation.In the Middle Ages, style translation was still one of the focuses of arguments about translation. Manlius Boethius argued that content and form were two opposing sides that could not be accomplished concurrently in translation. Leonardo Bruni expressed explicitly that the successful translation of style is an important standard to measure the qualification of a translator.In the Renaissance, German translation circle stressed that German was an independent language with its peculiar ways of expression and language style. They opposed the word-to-word translation which was popular in the Middle Ages and proposed to maintain the unique German style instead of imitating the style of other languages. In this period, British translators and translation theorists, such as Nicholas Grimald, Philemon Holland, and William Tyndale, etc. maintained that representation of style in translation must be given sufficient care and consideration.In a word, style translation has long since drawn the attention of the European translators and translation theorists. Though constantly in arguments and controversy, these translators and translation theorists advocated and promoted style translation, which helped in turn to advance the development of various European languages and to promote the literary and cultural communication and integration of different countries.Ancient China, however, seemed to be rather indifferent to the translation of style, for not many arguments over and proposals of style translation could be found in its long translation history. This situation formed a sharp contrast with the explicit viewpoints of style translation in ancient Europe. It did not come to an end until after Yan Fu put forward his "Xin, Da, Ya" translation principle in the late 1800s, of which the criterion of "Ya" aims at making the style of the translation elegant so as to meet the reading tastes of those high-rank feudal officials. Yan's translation criteria did not meet any challenge until after about one hundred years when Liu Zhongde proposed explicitly to replace the "Ya" (elegant) standard with "Qie"(close), which is a clearer and more accurate requirement of style translation which has exerted significant profound influence on theory studies and practices of style translation in China. Liu Miqing thought that the translation circle in China has for a rather long time ignorred the theoretical study of and lacked of sufficient scientific expounding on style translation. To change the backwardness of style translation studies in China, he spared a particular chapter in his monograph A New Compilation of Comtemporary Translation Theories and made some theoretical exploration into and elaboration on style translation. Liu Miqing argued that the attachment of the style of the translation to the original style requires us to find all the stylistic meanings of the source text, which in turn requires the translators to be able to recognize and understand various symbols that mark some stylistic meanings. These symbols are actually various kinds of language forms and are then called the stylistic markers, through careful study and analysis of which, people can recognize and master the style of the source text.According to Liu Miqing, the stylistic markers are generally grouped into two categories: the Form Markers and the Non-Formal Markers. Form Markers refer to the stylistic symbol system that focuses on the deviation of sound and forms, etc. which is the most important means that people employ to recognize the style. Form Markers can be further grouped into six subcatrgories, i.e. Phonological Markers, Register Markers, Syntactic Markers, Lexical Markers, Textual Markers and Markers of Figures of Speech. A good mastery of these various form markers is the most foundamental step to recognize the stylistic meanings carried by the language forms.The Form Markers symbolic system is undoubtedly a very important aspect from which a writer's stylistic features can be examined. But with only these materialized symbols of language forms, it would be difficult to have a whole and full understanding of the style of the literary works. To achiece this goal, one needs the help of some more symbolic systems of a higher level, which focuses on the more subjective and abstract Non-Formal Markers.Style is an important component of the value of a writer's literary work. If neglecting the meaning and the value of style in translation, one can hardly make his translation faithful to the source text. To fully and completely introduce a writer and his works to the target readers, apart from being faithful to the content and thought of the source text, translators should also strive to represent his style which is carried in various language forms in the text. Liu Miqing's Stylistic Markers Symbolic System provides us strong theoretical support to analyze and master the stylisic forms in the source text, to understand its stylistic meanings and to accurately represent them in translation. In the next chapter, we will then analyze the "Hemingway style" in The Old Man and the Sea on the basis of Liu Miqing's Stylistic Markers Theory.With the help of Wordsmith, an Englsih textual analysis software, Chapter Three focuses on the concrete embodyment of Hemingway style on the levels of words, rhetorics, sentence patterns etc. in The Old Man and the Sea. The software analysis finds in the source text of The Old Man and the Sea 26,966 tokens in 2,505 types, with an average word frenquency of 9.29, and an average word length of 3.79 letters. The whole text is made up of 1,162 sentences with an average sentence length of 23.20 words. In The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway used a huge number of simple monosyllabic and disyllabic words. The number of words formed with one to five letters is as high as 21,880, which is 81.14% of the overall tokens. The percentage of words with 6+ letters is as low as 18.9%, with less than one fifth of the overall tokens of the source text. Even among the words of 6+ letters, a considerable amount of them are derivatives from short, simple, common core vocabulary of Anglo-Saxon origin. Words with more than 10 letters in the source text amounts to only 222, with an average of less than one percent (0.8%). This statistics prove the general view that Hemingway favors those simple, colloquial vocabulary used by the mass in daily life.Statistics also show that nouns cover a very big percentage of the words used in The Old Man and the Sea, with a total of 4781 words which make up 17.73% of the overall tokens. The highest proportion of words is verbs, though, which amounts to 5772 words, covering 21.04% of the total number of words appearing in the text. Personal pronouns come to the third place, with 4268 words in total and covering 15.83% of the overall tokens. The next few places are taken up by modifiers(3139, 11.64%), prepositions and connctives(3135, 10.29%), adverbs(2001, 7.42%) and adjectives(1970, 6.49%).The top 10 most frequently used words in The Old Man and the Sea are THE, AND, HE, OF, I, IT, TO, HIS, WAS and A, which are all functional words that English sentences cannot do without, including articles, connectives, personal pronouns and link verbs, etc. The first content word appearing in the frequency list (ranked 13) is a noun (FISH). The next two ranks are taken up by MAN and OLD respectively. In the next 15 most frenquently used words, content words are still hard to find. Most of them are still functinal words like connectives, pronouns and prepositions, etc. In fact, of the first 30 most frequently used words, only one adjective (OLD) is found. This once again proves that Hemingway prefers plain, natural language in his writing and words of modification are hardly used, which is in accordance with his long cherished writing style of brevity.In effect, Hemingway is rather grudging in using adjectives in his literary creation. Statistics made by Wordsmith find 1970 recordings of adjectives in the source text of The Old Man and the Sea, about 6.49 percent of the overall tokens. What's more, most of the 1970 adjectives used are comparatively objective, flat, gradable adjectives, belonging to the common core vocabulary, whereas adjectives of subjective judgment are rarely seen.The same trend is also observed with adverbs. In the word freqnency list, not even an adverb is found among the first 20 most frequently used words. Of the 2001 adverbs employed by Hemingway, a great many are used to play the function of cohesion and coherence, expressing meanings of time, space, order and negation, etc., with only very few of them used to modify actions and conditions, or to express meanings of degrees. Statistics concerning the use of adverbs once again prove the brevity and simplicity characteristics of Hemingway's choice of words in The Old Man and the Sea.The above statistical data reveal Hemingway's writing style concerning the choice of words in The Old Man and the Sea: Firstly, a huge amount of typically short common core words of Anglo-Saxon origin are used with a very high frequency. Secondly, the parts of speech of words are comparatively concentrated, employing in his writing few adjectives, especially few adjectives of subjective judgment, and few adverbs of degree, intensity, or manner, not to say words of exaggeration. These "rhetoric-oriented" stylistic features are used out of the necessity of the "content-oriented" style: such words are chosen to describe comparatively general yet relatively objective matters or concepts so as to make the thought expressed in a vague and indistinct way which not only enriches the connotation but also strengthens the expansion of the language, as a result of which, the novel fascinates its readers with special artistic charm and leaves them sufficient space to ponder and consider, thus realizing his composing principle of the "Iceburg Theory".As an excellent language master, not unexpectedly, Hemingway also employes quite some figures of speech in The Old Man and the Sea to strengthen the tone and add to the force of the sentences with a good, successful effect. According to the author's statistics, more than 10 kinds and over 150 examples of rhetorical devices are used in The Old Man and the Sea, among which are similes, matephors, onomatopoeia, alliteration, parallelism, inversion, and conversion etc. These figures of speech almost appear on each of the pages of the novel and have then greatly enhanced the expressing effect of the language of the novel.Figurative rhetorics like similes and metaohors are often used when Hemingway intends to explain or illustrate things, matters and phenomena that either are not frequently seen or are difficult to describe. This helps to make those more abstract, strange, or fuzzy concepts become more direct, more distinct and easier for the readers to understand and accept the meanings they intend to express, and helps to shorten the distance between the writer, the object and the reader and to leave the reader an everlasting, vivd image in his mind for him to ponder over. Sometimes those metaphorical sentences are so vividly presented and intelligently devised that the readers cannot help but laugh from time to time. They undoubtedly help enhance the effect of hemingway's language expression and provide us another perspective of his brevity style of writing.Comparatively speaking, phonological rhetorics are not as frequently used as the figurative rhetorics in The Old Man and the Sea, but the few examples of sentences using onomatopoeia make the readers feel as if personally on the scene because of the vividness and liveliness brought about by the imitation of various sounds, which undoubtedly intensifies the effect of expression. Examples of alliteration, on the other hand, are more likely used to reflect with its special sound effect the spiritual status of dullness and monotonousness or the emotion of abhorrence and abomination.Syntactic rhetorics which includes parallelism, repetition, inversion etc. is probably the most frequently used figures of speech in The Old Man and the Sea. These rhetorical devices produce great momentums and intense rhythms to enhance their expressing effect with their uniformed structures and sentence patterns.Another kind of powerful rhetoric style in The Old Man and the Sea is conversion, which, by changing the part of speech of a particular word, expresses more meanings with less words, embodying successfully the stylistic view of "Less is more" proposed by Hemingway. In most cases, Hemingway either chooses the rarely used verb usage of a word instead of its usual usage as a noun or an adjective, or directly converts some nouns, adjectives, or even adverbs into verbs. By so doing, he omits various supplementary descriptive words of modification, which would otherwise have to be used to make the sentence read smooth and clear, and saves at least one or two words in each of those sentences. As a result, the sentences express "more profound meanings in much less words".To sum up, Hemingway employs a great number of rhetorical devices in The Old Man and the Sea, the use of which makes the language of the novel brief and concise, vivid and lively, thoughtful and connotative, and puts into practice his long-held viewpoint of "Iceburg Theory" and successfully realizes his brevity style of writing.Chapter Four first makes a brief survey of domestic study of Hemingway, then introduces the translation and publishing of The Old Man and the Sea in China, and in the end discusses the representation of Hemingway style on levels of words, rhetorical devices, sentence patterns etc. in the five Chinese translations of the novel.According to a statistics conducted by the author himself, Hemingway and his masterpiece The Old Man and the Sea have been under intensive study for quite a long period of time in China. Recordings of studies on the stylistic features of The Old Man and the Sea are not many, and research papers on the translation of The Old Man and the Sea are even more difficult to find. Statistics show that though articles discussing The Old Man and the Sea are comparatively aboundant, very few of them are attributed to study on Hemingway's literay style, not to say to study on the translation of his literary style. Searching in the 1994-2008 database of CNKI with "The Old Man and the Sea" and "translation" as two key words, the author finds altogether 11 recordings. Careful reading shows that 4 of these recordings are not related to the translation of Hemingway's works at all. Of the rest 7 related ones, 2 just touches collaterally some examples of translation from the novel. Only 5 in total can be categorized as serious studies on the topic.He Mingxia and Wang Guifen make a stylistic comparison of two Chinese versions of The Old Man and the Sea based on statistical analysis of the language style of a part of the novel. Liu Wenjie and Wang Ping make a comparative study of three Chinese versions of the novel on their handling of cohesive means of the source text. The author of this dissertation thinks that He & Wang's research on translation study of Hemingway's works is pioneering because they introduce the quantitative analysis approach to study on Hemingway style, thus making the study on Hemingway style rational and objective rather than staying on the level of subjective comments. But problems still exist in these studies:1. The quantitative analysis does not cover the whole text, thus lack of completeness in the research.2. The statistical anaysis made by the authors is too rough and sketchy.3. The analysis makes subjective judgment on grammar, vocabulary and syntactic cohesion of the source text without quantitative comparison of both the source text and the translations, thus lack of sufficient objectivity.4. Language details are not sufficiently studied in the statistical analysis.5. Samples compared are not rich and still lack of representativity.Hemingway is a writer of unique style, which once influenced a whole generation of American writers, and even world literary creation. Studies on the translation of his style with scientific analytical methods would be of great value. To achieve this goal, the author of this dissertation strive to make some breakthrough in the following aspects:1. Increase the objects to be compared to the whole text of 5 Chinese translations.2. Expand the fields of comparison from grammar, vocabulary, and sentence patterns to cultural items and rhetorical devices as well.3. Compare the tranlations against the source text in the light of the "Iceburg Theory" and check the degree of representation of Hemingway style in each of the five translations, and accordingly makes qualitative and quantitative evaluation on the quality of the translations.First we use the Chinese textual analysis software ICTCLAS (trial version) to cut the words, and then use the English textual analysis software Conc300 to do the calculations. Statistics show that the average length of the 5 translations of the novel is of 43,300 Chinese characters. Song Biyun's version uses the least characters of 38,165 which is 5,135 characters less than average and is only about four fifths of the longest version done by Haiguan. If we judge the brevity of a translation solely from the number of characters used, Song's version is undoubtedly the briefest one among the five. Besides, statistics show that the number of the overall types of Song's version is clearly smaller than that of any other versions, with a 6000-word difference from the highest. This difference also indicates that Song's version is much closer to the style of the source text, thus has done a better job in representing Hemingway style in translation because Hemingway himself also likes using some of the words repeatedly in his writing so that the overall types are notably smaller.Next we will check the representation of Hemingway style in the five Chinese versions on the level of words. The Old Man and the Sea is a short story with less than 27,000 words and a simple plot and less than 10 people in all. But strangely, personal pronouns are used for so many times that of the top 10 most frequently used words in The Old Man and the Sea, four are different personal pronouns, among which, "he" is ranked 3rd with 1167 times of appearance. Put together with "him" and "his", the male third person singular pronoun appeares in the text 1843 times in total, making up 6.83% of the total number of words. This is quite out of the ordinary.Careful study of the source text reveals that the third person singular pronouns like he, him, she, her, etc. are constantly used to refer to things, animals, fish, birds, or even abstract concepts,etc. The deviation of the usage of these pronouns reflects clearly and accurately the delicate emotive relationship between the old man and the big fish and the changes of this relationship as well. Regretfully, however, almost all the investigated translations fail to represent this subtle emotive element in the novel, and even fail to notice the message expressed by the italicized printing Hemingway has particularly set. Only Song Biyun notices this difference and tries to translate the word he into "Ta (ç‰ )" instead of "Ta (它)". But "Ta (ç‰ )" in Chinese only refers to a male animal (usu. a beast) without any emotive element in it, still losing the meaning carried in the source text.The source text is filled with this pronoun deviation particularly devised by Hemingway. This style of pronoun deviation helps to make fuller the stoic image of the old man Santiago and provides us a further and better understanding of his firm and unyielding disposition and his optimistic attitude towards life, and more importantly, helps to intensify and to protrude the theme of the story. It's a great pity that except for Song Biyun, all the other translators fail to notice these language deviations particularly placed by Hemingway, and failed to spread to the target readers the message Hemingway has intended to express through these deviations. As a result, the target readers lose some precious opportunities to learn and appreciate more of the splendid style of Hemingway, the language master.Besides the deviations of the personal pronouns, Hemingway also employs the deviation of foreign loans in his writing. The use of Spanish words in The Old Man and the Sea well illustrates Hemingway's profound feelings towards the Cuban people and adds a glamorous exotic color to the literay works. Statistics show that of the five translators, Dong Hengxun is more culturally awared who pays great attention to the proper handling of the Spanish words in the novel. By using the meathods of transplanting plus annotation, to reserve the cultual connotations caried by those Spanish words, Dong succeeds in keeping and representing the stylistic features brought about by the deviation of the foreign loans in the source text. In terms of cultural feature representation, Dong's version is no doubt a successful model worthy of learning from by the translation circle.In Chapter Three, we mentioned that Hemingway employed a great many of rhetorical devices to make his writing vivid and lively with simple yet connotative words and unified and forceful sentence stuctures. As most of the rhetorical devices are often used in both Chinese and English, we find through our research that most of the time, the five translators notice the great pains Hemingway takes in his literary creation and manage to search for appropriate, similar or corresponding rhetorical devices in Chinese to represent the stylistic features of the source text in the aspect of figures of speech, with a quite noticable effect. But, because of the...
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