Elicitation From Literary Stylistics

For a long time, there have been several controversies within the field of translation studies, among which is the controversy that whether translators should be form-oriented or content-oriented. The emergence of literary stylistics provides a powerful weapon to the side that persists in the form-orientation.Traditionally, literary critics comment on the subject matter of literary works against a historical background, whereas literary stylistics, on the stand of linguistics, studies the language of the text in a systematic way. Literary stylisticians believe that writers sometimes, in order to endow literary works specific thematic significance or literary effects or aesthetic values, writes with conscious choice among different ways of expression. Literary stylistics just studies the intentionally selected verbal choice and its relationship with the thematic significance or literary effects or aesthetic values of the works.This thesis, centered on the stylistic value of fiction, expounds upon the relationship between linguistic form and the thematic significance and literary effects of literary works and, by comparing four different Chinese versions of the Awakening on such aspects as lexical level, syntactic level, focalization and mode of speech representation, aims to demonstrate that although stylistic analysis based on linguistic form has firstly done in poetry, it also works well in prose fiction. However, when reading fictions, people are apt to neglect the function linguistic form may have in achieving stylistic effect on account of the story and plot. Thus, translators tend to stop at rendering the fictional facts of the source text into the target text without probing whether any literary values may be lost. Hence, deceptive equivalence is produced and hence the translators are far away from being adequate in translation. Meanwhile, this thesis also points out that although it is sometimes difficult to obtain stylistic equivalence due to the unique nature of two different language systems, some deceptiveequivalence are produced not because of the uniqueness of language systems themselves but due to the translators' failure of recognizing the thematic significance and literary effects wrapped in the specifically selected verbal choice. Such an apparent insufficient consideration of linguistic form is more popular in translating fiction.Stylistic analysis has been widely undertaken in western world for decades of years and has been introduced into China until around 1980, and literary stylistics, as a branch of stylistics, has been considered in relation to literary translation just one or two decades ago when more and more scholars see the necessity of doing research in this field. The thesis writer holds that literary stylistics plays an important role in literary translation.