Stylistic Awareness And Stylistic Decision-making In Literary Translation

Translation is a complex communicative act which involves the interaction of the source language (SL)-author, the translator as reader, the translator as target language (TL)-author, and the TL-reader. To convey the text from SL to TL without any gain or loss of meaning and achieve the unity between content and form, the production of style is crucial but not an easy job in that the SL-author and the translator have their respective styles and the translator will develop a subconscious stylistic awareness as a SL reader. How to deal with the relationship between the style of the translator and his own stylistic awareness? The translator is confronted with many choices and has to engage in a great number of decision-making activities.Using Mary Snell-Hornby's stylistic translation theory as a theoretical framework and combining stylistics and translation criticism, this thesis attempts to make an analysis of some extracts from Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang's English version Call to Arms. The purpose of this research is to discuss the transformation of style from the micro-level to the macro-level to find out how to make rational decisions based on the subconscious stylistic awareness so as to achieve the optimal stylistic adaptation of the TL text to the SL text.The thesis falls into six parts. The introductory part gives a brief retrospect of the development of stylistics and discusses its influence on and significance to translation studies and translation criticism.Chapter 1 starts with a definition of stylistics and style. In view of the debate over the issue of the translatability of style, this thesis maintains that style is not only translatable, but that the production of style is the ultimate goal of literary translation. The chapter also discusses how to make decisions when confronted with the subconscious awareness of style.Chapter 2 makes a brief introduction to Mary Snell-Hornby's integrated approach based on the Gestalt theory and prototypology, paying special attention to her theories on stylistic translation. Mary Snell-Hornby holds that translation involves two essential processes in transforming the stylistic features, namely, the stylistic analysis and the stylistic production of texts. For the former, she advocates the top-down principle, i.e. from macro- to micro-level. For the latter, she suggests borrowing Charles Fillmore's scenes-and-frames approach. The author of this thesis suggests a down-top approach, believing that it makes it available to produce the style of SL text more effectively.Chapters 3 and 4 illustrate how style can be produced by analyzing examples from the Yangs' English version of Call to Arms. Chapter 3 adopts Mary Snell-Hornby's top-down approach to interpret Lu Xun the man, his writing style in general and his style as manifested in Call to Arms. Chapter 4 introduces a down-top approach by citing examples from the Yangs' English version of Call to Arms. This chapter dwells on the strategies developed for producing the style of the text. It argues that to best realize the stylistic production of texts, it is advisable to adopt the down-top approach, starting from a micro level, i.e. phonological, lexical, syntactic units to a macro level i.e. discourse, register, etc.In conclusion, this thesis argues that it is not only possible but desirable for a translator to produce the style of the SL text in literary translation. However, the translator is faced with a variety of choices in this course and he is advised to adopt some strategies to make rational decisions so as to realize the stylistic adaptation of the TL text to the SL text.