The Narrative Model Of Stephen King's Horror Fictions And Its Translation

Stephen King is known all over the world for the popularity of his horror fictions. His being awarded of American Book Scholarship elicits an argument about his horror fictions and his position in American literature. However, one point that has never been argued about is that his fictions are bestseller in America. In contrast, the Chinese versions of his works fail to enjoy popularity in China. Chinese readers challenge the structures of the fictions from three aspects, namely, the incoherence of the text, the jump of the thought and differences between American popular culture and Chinese popular culture. The differences in cultural thought are reflected as the different attitudes of readers in the two countries toward the same narrative model of Stephen King's horror fictions. This paper, by analyzing and comparing the differences between the narrative model of Stephen King's horror fictions and that of Chinese horror fictions, explores the reason why the Chinese translation of Stephen King's horror fictions cannot enjoy popularity in China and the appropriate translation strategies of narrative model of Stephen King's horror fictions in order to achieve the expected function of the target text. This paper consists of four parts. It firstly introduces Functionalist approaches to translation and Chen Pingyuan's narrative model; Functionalist approaches indicate that translation purpose determines translation strategy. The translation of Stephen King's horror fictions is purposeful and it aims at popularity in China, which differs from other literary translation. Such purpose determines that the translation strategies the translator adopts should make the target text meet the reading habits of Chinese readers; and theory of narrative model describes discourse structure in which the translation strategies can be realized. Based on the narrative model of Genette and Russian narrative theory, the narrative model in this article is designed by Chinese famous narrative theorist Chen Pingyuan according to the history of Chinese novel's development. It includes three parts: narrative time, narrative point of view and narrative structure. The translator should also comply with the rule of meeting the reading habits of Chinese readers in his translation of the narrative model of Stephen King's horror fiction. Secondly, it analyzes the trend of the narrative model of Chinese current horror fictions in perspectives of theory and works and the tradition of Chinese novels'narrative models. Thirdly, it analyzes the narrative model of Stephen King's horror fictions. As psychological horror fictions, Stephen King's horror fictions adopt narrative model centered on the description of psychology of character. While Chinese horror fictions are plot-centered fictions, with plot-centered narrative model. Fourthly, it explores the appropriate translation strategies of the narrative model of Stephen King's horror fictions according to the Functionalist approaches and the summaries of some successful translation strategies in the translation of narrative model by Lin Shu and other translators, that is, to adjust the narrative model of the source text with the help of translation procedures such as explicit explanation, notes, deletion, summary, and relocation of the narrative time at the level of discourse structure.