A Stylistic Analysis Of The Chinese Translation Of The English Patient

Literary stylistics can be dated back to the rhetoric studies of ancient Greece and Rome. However, literary stylistics, which flourished under the combined influence of developments in literary criticism and linguistics, did not become an independent subject until recently. Stylistics was not introduced to mainland of China until around 1980. Before it was introduced, criticism of literary translation had "remained rather traditional, characterized by general and impressionistic comments on style or by an intuitive analysis with a notable lack of sensitivity to subtle stylistic devices" (Shen 1998:1).Literary stylistics, when applied to literary translation, can be a helpful remedy. It does not treat literary texts as objects of scientific scrutiny, not does it rely on subjective intuition. Assuming that prose fiction can be a valid area of investigation, this thesis will analyze the transference of style in terms of illogicality and tense, segmented sentence structure, the principle of climax, and speech and thought presentation.It aims at a more scientific stylistic analytical model to find out in what aspects stylistic losses may occur and to what extent deceptive equivalence can be avoided and functional equivalence can be achieved through the study of the Chinese translation of Michael Ondaatje's prize-winning novel The English Patient.