A Study Of Rhetoric And Its Translation In Desperate Housewives

Desperate Housewives, a currently well-known American soap opera, is not only a great hit on the American market, but also a huge success in China, especially won the heart of college students and urban white collars. To satisfy the great demands of the audiences, the Desperate Housewives is now broadcasting Season 7, from which we can see its popularity. Therefore, many scholars have been attracted to do research on the opera, most of which focus on the humorous language, female language and subtitle translating activity guided by the translating theory, few of them have done a systemic study from the point of rhetoric device, which is exactly the originality of this thesis. As a matter of fact, a great bunch of rhetoric devices have been used in this opera, such as simile, metaphor, hyperbole, personification, pun and so on. Though as common as they are, without these effective rhetoric devices, the conversation would be rather boring and bland, the plot would be simply dull and drab, losing its present glamour and popularity.Rhetoric translation is a hard branch in the field of translation. Literal translation or free translation?As the author is concerned, literal translation is better when a relevant rhetoric is available and their expressions and cultural images are close. Otherwise, addition, omission, extension, shifts of rhetoric devices,replacement should be used to compensate the translation, for the sake of reproducing the original rhetoric effects. Different rhetoric and contexts should be taken into consideration to choose an appropriate translation method, most importantly to transfer the original meaning precisely while guarantying the influence and easy understanding of the translation.This thesis takes the rhetoric language as the subject of study. The TV series Desperate Housewives is selected as the research material, to study the functions and translating methods of the rhetoric devices. Most of the example sentences are chosen from the newest Season 5, 6 and 7. This thesis is composed of six chapters. The first chapter is the introduction part, mainly dwells on the purpose, significance, research status home and abroad in this field and the originality and thesis structure. The second chapter is an introduction to rhetoric, first definition, then development history and classifications of rhetoric. The following chapter 3, 4 and 5 are the main bodies of the thesis, corresponding example sentences are chosen to analyze the lexical, syntactical and phonetic rhetoric devices, mainly about their functions and translating methods. Chapter 6 is the conclusion part, pointing out the limitation and deficiency of the thesis.Last but not least, it needs to be pointed out that all the example sentences provided in this thesis are the first-hand material from the up-dated Desperate Housewives, the dialogues are more natural, which guarantee the research results more authentic, effective and persuasive.