Translation Of Fictional Dialogues: A Case Study Of Three Chinese Versions Of Alice's Adventures In Wonderland From The Perspective Of Equivalence Of Subjectification

As an integral part of fiction, fictional dialogues play an essential role in unfolding the plot and portraying the character. It is safe to say that the quality of the translation of a novel is directly linked to the quality of the translation of its dialogues. Despite this situation, the problems are found concerning the translation of fictional dialogues:this important issue in Translation Studies has not been given the sufficient attention it deserves and very few researchers have focused on it; the perspectives from which existing studies were conducted are confined to those of pragmatics, such as the cooperative principle and conversational implicatures. Meanwhile, the comparative reading of original English novels and their Chinese versions has led the author of the present study to find that translators often fail to correctly convey the utterance meaning that is related to the subjectivity of the language speaker. In view of this situation, the author chose to research into the translation of fictional dialogues. By analyzing the inadequacies of the translation of the dialogues in the three Chinese versions of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland from the perspective of equivalence of subjectification (the linguistic structures and strategies by which a speaker's subjectivity, i.e. the speaker's comment on and attitude to what he/she is uttering [Lyons 1977], is realized [Finegan 1995]), the author attempted to give suggestions about how to effectively translate fictional dialogues and argued that translators should try their best to keep equivalence between the original and their translations with regard to subjectification when translating fictional dialogues.The author first compared the translation of all dialogues in three Chinese versions of the novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and identified the dialogues that are translated differently by translators of any of the three Chinese versions and their respective translations. Then, a systematic review of the theory of subjectivity/subjectification was carried out and the exact meaning of "equivalence of subjectification" was presented. Finally, the failures of the translation of the dialogues that appear in the three Chinese versions of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland were analyzed from the perspective of equivalence of subjectification.Data analysis went through three phases:First, thirty dialogues were selected whose translation problems are related to the subjectivity of language speakers; second, these selected dialogues were further classified under the three headings of perspective (the point of view from which people look at things and communicate about them), affect (the feelings, moods, dispositions and attitudes conveyed by language speakers when uttering something), and epistemic modality (the speaker's deduction or evaluation of the truth of the proposition as contained in the utterance) on the basis of the translation problems they contain; third, the reasons why these translation failures appear were analyzed from the perspective of equivalence of subjectification so as to identify the problems translators often encounter and the translation strategies they should adopt when translating fictional dialogues.The following are the findings of the present research:1. There are not many dialogues that are translated differently in the three Chinese versions of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Generally speaking, these translators performed well in translating the dialogues in the novel.2. The translation problems of nearly all these chosen dialogues can be reasonably explained and analyzed from the perspective of equivalence of subjectification. Of all thirty translation problems, seventeen are related to the affect of the language speaker, six to perspective and seven to epistemic modality.3. Translators should try to achieve equivalence of subjectification in translating fictional dialogues. Specifically, they should make sure that the original and their translation can achieve equivalence with regard to perspective, affect and epistemic modality. Only in this way can the utterance meaning of fictional dialogues be more effectively translated.As an attempt to apply the theory of subjectivity/subjectification to Translation Studies, the present study reveals the importance of equivalence of subjectification in the translation of fictional dialogues; hopefully it can help translation practitioners more effectively translate dialogues in fiction.