A Comparative Study Of Two Chinese Versions Of Pride And Prejudice

This thesis will make a comparison between the two Chinese versions of Pride and Prejudice—translations by Wang Keyi(王科一) and Sun Zhili(孙致礼). The structure, choice of words and style of these two versions will be compared and analyzed, as well as the literal and free translations in them. Each of the two translators has a great command of language and a good understanding of the original text, however, their respective versions still vary a lot from the translation of idioms to the overall style to different degrees of adaptations to Chinese culture. In the analysis we also briefly introduce the conception of domesticating and foreignizing. More importantly, all these translation strategies are further analysed in their impacts on the process of building characters, and the correct understanding of different characters can help the translators to achieve functional equivalence. We use examples to discuss the figures of speech and further discuss the author's intention and descriptive features. Humor and irony, as the features of Austen's work, are one of the main focuses, because they determine the tone of sentences and the direction of characters. Proper arrangement to reproduce the homor and irony can help to get the same response from the target text readers as the source text readers. The feature of this thesis is that it discusses many factors that affect the impact of translation.