A Stylistic-Oriented Study On The Back-translation Of The Novel Four Generations Under One Roof

Lao She is a world-renowned master of language. The language in his works has formed exquisite lexical, grammatical and narrative systems. His masterpiece Four Generations under One Roof is a magnum opus depicting the lives and struggle of ordinary people in Peiping under the trample of Japanese army. He wrote exquisitely about the lives and thoughts of people living in a small ally and from all walks of lives, and the human nature and ethic psychology shown on them. These depictions gain the novel the same recognition as The Dream of Red Mansions does. Meanwhile, in the novel, Lao She continued with his humourous, sharp, exquisite language style full of sympathy and insight for the society and reproduced a true history and true people in the history.However, it is a serious loss that this novel, originally planed with one million words and one hundred chapters, lost the last 13 chapters. These chapters we are now reading is back-translated from the English version. As for to what extent does the back-translation replicates the original style, it is a subject that intrigues great interest among readers. Back-translation is often used as a method to examine a translational work, but how to evaluate a back-translation without the original text? It is likely that literary stylistics should be introduced into it.Literary stylistics is a discipline mediating between literary criticism and linguistics. While appreciating a literary work, the reader will have the text analyzed with modern linguistic theory and method, finding the artistic and aesthetic significance in these linguistics features.According to these features of stylistic analysis, this paper will first respectively have analyses on the style of the original text, English version and the back-translated part. Then combining the English version, a comparison will be carried out between the chapters written by Lao She and the back-translated part. Through the comparison, an objective and quantified evaluation will be made on the back-translation.The first chapter of this paper gives a brief introduction of Lao She and his novel Four Generations under One Roof followed by a brief evaluation of the English version from translational perspective. In Chapter Two, first section is an introduction of stylistics and the necessity of applying stylistic analysis to translation studies. Then a theoretical...