A Literary Stylistic Approach To The Translation Of Style In The Three Chinese Versions Of The Adventure Of Huckleberry Finn

Style translation is an important aspect in literary translation. The equivalence or similarity in style between the original text and the target text has been established as one of the most important criteria for evaluating the quality of translated texts by a number of famous and influential translators and translation theorists both at home and abroad. However, the problems aroused by style translation have bothered the translators and translation theorists for quite a long time and caused heated discussion in eastern and western translation field.The establishment of literary stylistics provides a useful tool for studies in style. Contrary to the impressionistic and intuitive method in traditional literary criticism, literary critics can make a systemic description and analysis of the foregrounding features in a text and get relatively objective results of its style. Apparently, translators will benefit a lot from the results so as to guide his or her translation practices. Translation critics can also make use of the results to evaluate different versions of a literary text.In this paper, three Chinese versions of Mark Twain's The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn are compared based on Leech and Short's literary stylistic mode. The analysis consists of four categories:lexical categories, grammatical categories, figures of speech and cohesion and context. Through analysis, we get a clearer idea of the realistic and humorous style of this novel and grasp a lot of useful evidence for the evaluation of the Chinese translations. It is proved that literary stylistics is a useful tool for literary analysis and a touchtone for translation criticism. Besides, the application of literary stylistics to translation studies also makes a contribution to the multi-level translation theories.