A Comparative Study Of The Three Chinese Versions Of Great Expectations

Great Expectations is one of the finest novels by Charles Dickens. In this novel he displays a marvelous talent in language by his flexible use of various linguistic devices. All such semantic and stylistic features, like the original diction with rich cultural and social connotations, diverse syntactic structures and patterns, ironic and humorous tone, and a large variety of dialect, slang and jargon used in the dialogue, distinguish the novel from others and meanwhile pose great difficulty in the process of translating from English to Chinese. Therefore, this thesis makes a comparative study of the three Chinese versions of Great Expectations in the light of Nida's functional equivalence theory. It centers on a discussion of the three translations' "levels of equivalence" to the original and "degrees of adequacy" to the target language readers in terms of meaning and style.This thesis consists of four chapters. Chapter One makes a general survey of the novel so as to offer some background information. This chapter begins with a brief introduction to the novel and its profound theme. It follows with the discussion of characteristics of Dickens' language style displayed in this novel. Chapter Two elaborates on the criteria of translation and translation criticism and thus states the theoretic basis for the evaluation of the three translations. General theories concerned with the criteria of translation in the western world as well as in China are reviewed. Based on the Nida's classical definition of translation, two criteria, namely, the criteria of semantic equivalence and stylistic equivalence are proposed for further translation quality assessment. Chapter Three makes a systematic and detailed comparison of the three Chinese versions. The evaluation is made to see whether the message in thesource language is fully reproduced first in terms of meaning and secondly in terms of style. The first section in this chapter is based on some findings of the semantic studies, and it focuses on whether the types of meanings are transferred in the three translations. The second section delves into the discussion of translation of stylistic features of the original work. In the light of the classification of stylistic markers by Liu Miqing, the detailed analysis is built upon four linguistic levels, i.e. the phonological, lexical, syntactical and discoursal levels. It dwells upon the translation of various stylistic devices and the treatment of the language varieties in the course of translation. Chapter Four gives an overview of the characteristics of the three versions, and points out their merits and demerits respectively. Finally a conclusion is drawn on the basis of the comparative study and a set of translation strategies are provided for further improvement of the translations.Literary translation is a painstaking job of recreation. The highest level of the literary translation is to achieve the closest natural equivalence in meaning and style, or in other words, to achieve resemblance in both form and spirit. Although absolute equivalence is impossible, translators should make utmost endeavors to produce a desirable translation.