A Contrastive Study Of Rhetoric In Translation Between English And Chinese

Rhetoric is a branch discipline of linguistics. It is not a new subject. Both in the West and in China, rhetoric has a long history. The traditional rhetoric is studied mainly from the perspective of linguistics. In recent years, scholars study rhetoric from such subjects as psychology, culturology, sociology, cognition, so rhetoric has become the outcome of crisscross multidisciplinary research.Rhetoric stems from eloquence in ancient Greece. It is mainly concerned with choice of diction, sentence-making, organization of paragraphs, arrangement of discourses, and application of figures of speech, so as to direct people to apply and invent varieties of rhetorical devices to meet the needs of complicated social communication. Both in speech and in writing, the appropriate use of rhetorical devices is sure to strengthen the artistic appeal and enhance the expressiveness.Rhetorical devices are generally classified into two categories: communicative rhetorical devices and aesthetic rhetorical devices. They are equal to passive rhetoric and active rhetoric proposed in Origin of Rhetoric by Chen Wangdao(陈望道). The former focuses on logic and brevity of expressions, including choice of words, variety of sentence patterns, organization of paragraphs and arrangement of the whole discourse; the latter mainly refers to the practical application of figures of speech, which makes the text more vivid and elegant. The two categories of rhetorical devices are often intertwined to add the sense oflanguage and to deepen the expression of thoughts.There are so many rhetorical features both in English and Chinese languages that rhetoric has become a major factor in the bilingual and bicultural translation, which cannot be ignored. However, English and Chinese belong to different language families, and there are great disparities between them. For instance, the discourse structure of English is usually lineal, while that of Chinese is spiral; the cohesive device of English paragraphing is usually hypotaxis, while parataxis is often adopted in Chinese discourses.As to aesthetic rhetorical devices, most figures of speech in English can find the similar or the same ones in Chinese, which lays the ground of the translatability of most figures of speech. However, owing to the differences of cultural history and aesthetic view between English and Chinese, there are partial equivalent and no equivalent between English figures of speech and Chinese ones. Certainly, to translate them often leads to linguistic or cultural loss in the version, especially some phonetic rhetorical devices often lose their beauty of rhythm in the bilingual translating.Based on the theoretical foundations of linguistics, stylistics and translation studies, this thesis adopts the approach of contrastive analysis and focuses on how to deal with the rhetorical features in the source-language text in the process of bilingual translation. A qualified translator should comprehend the original text and express it well in target language. On the one hand, a translator should thoroughly analyze and understand the rhetorical devices in the source language; on the other hand, he should also successfully render them in the version and take some effective steps to make up for the linguistic or cultural loss so as toretain the original content and style well.