English-Chinese Novel Translation Criticism In The Perspective Of Bakhtin's Dialogue Theory

The dialogue theory based on Bakhtin's literary researches has fully revealed the equallydialogic relationship among the author, the protagonist and the reader, which was furthermoredeveloped into the dialogue philosophy. It embodies Bakhtin's translinguistics thinking. Dialoguetheory is the gist of Bakhtin's philosophy in the earlier stage and later stage; it is also the nucleusof his literature theory. According to Bakhtin, we can understand the dialogue theory both inmicro and macro level. The former means to view the dialogue as a form of mutualcommunication between the speaker and the listener. As to the latter level, the dialogue refers tothe form of utterances interaction in any meaning. The real purpose of the dialogue is tocommunicate, to reach the truth. Bakhtin regarded the dialogue as the nature of human life andhuman existence. Thus, the dialogue theory is actually based on"human", whose essential task isto explore the human nature. After researches into the works and theories of Dostoevsky's andRabelais', he set up his own dialogue theory system. Nowadays the dialogue theory has beenemployed in many fields of research.Translation criticism is an essential link between theory and its practice, and it is a relativelyvigorous subject in that it has been extending its research scope. Thus the author thought aboutapplying the dialogue theory into translation criticism research. Since the value judgment willlead to the pluralism of the criteria. And actually translating is also an equal dialogue among theauthor, the protagonist, the reader and the translator under the textual and cultural etc contexts.This research applied Bakhtin's dialogue theory into English-Chinese literary translationcriticism through comparing the Memoirs of My Dead Life by George Moore with Sun Yixue's translatiotranslation in Chinese. It not only proved the universality of Bakhtin's dialogue theory and hisdialogue philosophy, but also put forward a translation criticism criterion which requires furtherexamination though. By discussing how well Sun Yixue has exchanged the dialogue between theprotagonists, between the text and the reader, between the author and the reader, the researcherprovided some proofs to judge the quality of the translation work. By this research, we can notonly reread that past classic literature work, but more importantly, it is also a try to extend thehorizon of the translation criticism study.