An Analysis Of Dialogues Translation In Strange Stories From A Chinese Studio

Liaozhai has been conceived as the pinnacle of short story in classical Chinese, which deserves wide and deep study all through ages. This paper on the whole focuses on the analysis of characters'dialogue translation from ST Liaozhai to TT Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio by John Minford in the version of 2005. Characters'dialogue has been by far regarded as one of the most important literary devices in its various functions to enhance the readability of novel. The ST Liaozhai by Pu Songling provided a fabulous employment of characters'dialogue in classical Chinese mingled with colloquialism. The delicate arrangement of classical Chinese and colloquialism in characters'dialogue has given the ST a bouncing and lifelike picture and engenders the translation great difficulty at the same time.This thesis summarizes and analyzes the characters dialogue translation in Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio. Through the study, the underlying tactics employed in dealing with the hidden information are ferreted out. The thesis then offers the three kinds of imbalance in the translation of character dialogue. In doing so, I hope to lend certain clues for the latter researches on dialogue translation.All together there are six chapters contained in this thesis. Chapter one introduction presents the focus and the goal of study. Chapter two literature review includes five sections respectively as introduction of literary status of ST Liaozhai and the choice of ST Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio; the writing style of TT Note novel (note fiction); summary of former researches on the translation of Chinese classics (TCC); former researches on characters'dialogue translation and former researches on English translated version of Liaozhai. Chapter three briefly illustrates the methodology in the study. Chapter four is the main body of the thesis. Based on the classification of two different categories of characters'dialogue in the ST, detailed studies in this chapter are carried out respectively on the evaluation of the translation of these dialogues in TT. For dialogues in classical Chinese, studies are concentrated on the translation of terms of address and the recondite allusion, both of which are the typical linguistic phenomenon in classical Chinese. For dialogues mainly in colloquialism, analysis focuses on the terms of address and the overall evaluation. The paper then moves forward to the comparison and contrast between the dialogue in ST and TT as well as between translated dialogue in classical Chinese and in colloquialism. The results reveal certain translation tactic ever employed in dialogue reproduction in target language by Minford, however, deficiencies are also there to be seen, which inevitably causes the imbalances in the dialogue translation process, that is the imbalance between aesthetic literariness and literary meaning transfer, the imbalance between the translation of dialogue in classical Chinese and in colloquialism and the imbalance of the character image formation.On the basis of translation analysis, chapter five then provides certain possible causes and explanations for the imbalances from readers'acceptance perspective and culture research viewpoints.Chapter six summarizes the whole process of the research, points out the innovative contribution of the thesis as well as the existing deficiencies in the study. The thesis will be honored if it could provide further suggestion for the latter study.