On The Translation Of Style In Love In A Fallen City

Can style be translated? This is one of the hot topics the translation field has been arguing about. As for this problem, there are only two schools:one thinks that style can not be translated and the other insists that style can be translated. The concept of style was vague and abstract before the applying of linguistics into literature, and the studies on style translation were far from being scientific and systematic. The primary problem arising in the translation of fiction is called "deceptive equivalence". That is, only the referential meanings of the original are transmitted, while literary significance or aesthetic effects carried by some particular stylistic devices are ignored.To handle the translation of fiction in a scientific way, the thesis is adopting literary stylistic approach to discuss style translation based on Shen Dan's definition of style as artistically or thematically motivated linguistic choices. Literary stylistics describes the linguistic forms and at the same time digs out the thematic aesthetic meanings of the literary text. It focuses on the relationship between linguistic forms and thematic or aesthetic meanings, thus helping to maintain the original stylistic values in translation. Literary stylistics can be used as a touchstone of judging literary translation.Guided by the stylistic theories of Leech and Short, that is, analyzing the literary text from a linguistic perspective, this thesis explores how literary work through using particular choices of language to present and enforce the thematic and aesthetic meanings. Eileen Chang is one of the best and most important writers in modern Chinese literary, as a writer with unique and brilliant style; can the distinguished language style of Eileen Chang's fiction be reproduced in its English version? The thesis will analyze the style translation of the Love in a Fallen City at lexical level, syntactic level and rhetorical level. In analyzing the linguistic forms at these three levels which manifest Eileen Chang's stylistic features in Love in a Fallen City, the first aim is to prove the necessity and usefulness of literary stylistic theory in guiding the style translation of fiction; the second aim is to explore the translatability of Eileen Chang's unique language style and the translator's translation strategy of rendering her language style in Love in a Fallen City.