On The Translation Of Style In Fiction

Stylistic translation is an important and yet thorny issue in literary translation. However, traditionally the study of stylistic translation remains comparatively backward, which can be accounted for at two aspects.Firstly, there're controversial definitions of 'style', among which this thesis favors the view that "style is choice". 'Choice' here includes both choice of linguistic form/narrative discourse and content/narrative fact, and the relationship between them is dialectic and unified. Therefore, this thesis follows the line of stylistic monism rather than stylistic dualism or 'pluralism'. This thesis goes further to adopt Professor Shen Dan's definition of style: "style is artistically or thematically motivated choice". This definition necessitates the conformation of 'choice' to the criterion of 'thematic relevance', hence excluding all those thematically irrelevant choices from the current study.Secondly, pure linguistic theory or general translation studies alone cannot effectively guide the translation of literary discourse, for literary translation should not only aim at achieving 'referential equivalence', but also 'stylistic and artisticequivalence'. This thesis introduces literary stylistics —— an intermediate disciplinemediating between linguistics and literary studies, into the study of stylistic translation, aiming to help approach this problem.The thesis then explores the necessity and feasibility of applying literary stylistics into fictional stylistic translation from theoretical and practical perspectives. Theoretically, the author points out the inefficiency of general translation studies in guiding literary translation, and the effectiveness of literary stylistics in solving one of the common problems in literary translation, i.e. 'deceptive equivalence' at both levels of 'fictional fact' and 'narrative discourse'. Practically, the present study mainly analyzes the stylistic values of linguistic forms in fiction at the aspect of lexis and syntax respectively, and examines the gains as well as the losses of some translations in terms of stylistic values.