Stylistic Approaches To The Translation Of Shakespeare

Style is an important but often neglected factor in traditional translation theory. In face of this phenomenon, I develop the traditional translation theory to put forward my own idea: stylistic translating theory, which aims at a foregrounding equivalence. It regards translating as a communicative process, which takes place within a social context and mediated by the translator between the author of the source text and whoever are its target text receivers. In doing so, a translator should follow a three-step model: (1) Analyzing the source text from the perspective of the functional stylistics. He should regard the text as the basic unit of translating and find the foregrounding pattern of it. (2) Transferring the source text into the target text. (3) Restituting in the target context with the purpose of achieving the foregrounding equivalence. What is crucial for the translation theorists is a systematic study of problems and solutions by close comparison of ST and TT procedures. I will apply this theory to one of the weak point of the genre-focused translation studies: drama translation. From the stylistic perspective, it is suitable to analyze the written text but not the live performance. Literary stylistics soundly presents us with a perfect and systematic way of analysis by following three approaches: drama as poetry, drama as fiction and drama as conversation. The fist two applications, although indispensable, do not really account for aspects of drama that arc different from poetry and fiction-the qualities that make it a genre in its own right. One crucial aspect in which drama differs from poetry and fiction is in its emphasis onverbal interaction, and the way relationships between people are constructed and negotiated through what they say. Discourse analysis can help lot in this aspect. Within the model of stylistic translation theory, the first step of translating Shakespeare is to put the play in the source context to grasp its foregrounding pattern. Secondly, we will select some extracts from it to analyze them within one of these dimensions. We will try our best to find the local foregrounding features and the motivations behind them. Thirdly, in the process of transfer, we will seek to maintain the foregrounding features in the translated text under the direction of a functional stylistics. The last step for us is to compare the source text and the translated text to deduce the procedures and techniques involved in this process.