Style And Aesthetics: On The Translation Of English Prose

Prose is a quite flexible literary genre. In English, the term "prose" is very broad and comprehensive in meaning. In a broad sense, it refers to any writing not in verse form. In a narrow sense, it is confined to the literary genre as opposed to poetry, fiction and drama, much like sanwen, suibi or xiaopinwen in Chinese literature. Since English prose is such a vast subject, the author narrows its scope in the present thesis to those short literary elegant prose writings in English. This type of prose is excellent in both content and language, with a fine combination of narration, expression and argumentation. Rather than the dull elaboration and reasoning, the narration and argumentation are charged with emotions. As a most fitting literary genre, prose is widely used to discuss a matter, reveal emotional aura of life, or express a point of view etc. The rich artistic attainments embodied in prose appeal to the aesthetic feeling of the readers.Historically speaking, in literary translation studies, much attention has been given to the translation of poetry and fiction in China. In comparison, the study of prose translation has been neglected. As a matter of fact, prose translation accounts for a lion's share in the translation activities and translators devoted to this area are by no means rare. However, a sorry fact is that far less time has been spent in studying the specific problems involved in translating prose. Up to now there is a conspicuous lack of theses which approach the study of prose translation in a systematic and comprehensive way. Under these circumstances, the present author shall make an attempt at offering a thesis on the translation of English prose into Chinese in terms of style and aesthetics.The study is conducted mainly under the guidance of Nida's theory of functional equivalence, which aims at reproducing in the receptor language theclosest natural equivalent of the source language message. The whole thesis is organized into three chapters. Chapter one gives a brief introduction to English prose, particularly the definition, kinds and history of prose development. Chapter two focuses on expounding the concept of translation, Nida's functional equivalence, as well as the essence of prose translation. Chapter three undertakes a detailed analysis of the translation of English prose from the stylistic and aesthetic perspective respectively. In terms of style, the author roughly classifies English prose into six categories, namely, the plain style and the ornate style, the laconic style and the involved style, the ironical style and the humorous style. Then, a study is carried on to demonstrate how each style could be reproduced effectively in the target language. A great many prose translations are presented to help illustrate the point. The following aesthetic study is subdivided into two parts: first, conveyance of beauty in language which is approached in phonological level, lexical level and syntactic level; second, conveyance of beauty in images, where attention is concentrated on- the perception of images in prose texts, the priority of image equivalence and faculties involved in image-actualization in the target language. The thesis ends with a conclusion which aims at generalizing the importance of Nida's theory of functional equivalence in guiding the prose translation.Zhang Qianli (Foreign Linguistics & Applied Linguistics)Directed by Prof. Han Zhonghua...