Functional Stylistics And Translation Of Style In Fiction

The problem of stylistic translation (by this expression, we mean translation of style in this paper.) is the most difficult in the study of literary translation, and is also a key to artistic reproduction. Study of stylistic translation, particularly of the translation of style in fiction, remains remarkably traditional, "characterized by general and impressionistic comments on style or by an intuitive analysis with a notable lack of sensitivity to subtle stylistic devices."Literary stylistics is a study of literary style based on modern linguistics. It interprets the aesthetic functions of a text by describing the language. Therefore, to apply literary stylistics to translation of style would be helpful to introduce "more precise and more penetrating stylistics models and methods to replace traditional impressionistic approaches, and bring studies of stylistic translation up to date and improve, as a result, the quality and standard of literary translation."Shen Dan's Literary Stylistics and Fictional Translation is a great attempt at applying literary stylistics to literary translation. Although it puts much emphasis on the stylistic analysis, its basic aim is to "study the relationship between literary stylistics and the criticism of literary translation," not to address the problem of translation of fictional style particularly, thus fails to elucidate some important aspects about stylistic translation.However, this paper aims at explicating the necessity and validity of applying functional stylistics to the study of translation of style in fiction.Based on systemic functional grammar, and using fictions as the object of study, functional stylistics belongs to literary stylistics. The preference for the name of functional stylistics instead of literary stylistics is to highlight functional stylistics' linguistic basis is systemic functional theory.Functional stylistics, however, is not here taken for granted. And thisbrings us to another basic aim of the present book, which is to explicate the nature, function and validity of functional stylistics as a discipline.In accordance with the two basic aims, this paper is divided into two major parts. The first part, consisting of chapters one, two and three, will examine functional stylistics as a discipline. The second, chapters four and five, will argue and demonstrate the application of functional stylistics to the translation of style in fiction. Chapter One deals with the linguistic background of functional stylistics, which is the systemic functional grammar. This linguistic theory includes the functional theory, systemic theory and contextual theory, which combine to not only offer explanation to both the in-text linguistic phenomena and the extra-text cultural factors, also interpret aesthetic functions of both linguistic medium and content. Chapter Two seeks to define the concept of style held by functional stylistics as an intermediary discipline in relation to the concerns of other stylistic approaches to literary style. It is pointed out that its limitation in the domain of text style, and its conception of viewing style as foregrounding, pluralist and multileveled are precise, penetrating and valid in stylistic analysis. Chapter Three presents the framework and model for analyzing style.Chapter four and five deal with theoretical analysis and practical analysis respectively. There are four theoretical reasons. First, in the most general sense, functional stylistics would be extremely valid and necessary while applied to stylistic translation because it is an intermediary discipline linking linguistic description with literary appreciation. Second, functional stylistics can solve the problem of "Deceptive equivalence"1" on the level of 'fictional fact', namely, the problem of stylistic meaning loss on the content aspect, while other stylistics can't. Third, its contextual theory can serve to explain the stylistic recasting or decoloring phenomenon, which is resulting from cultural or other extra-text factors like translation br...