Foregrounding In Literary Translation

Style has always been the hot-debated topic in the field of translation. Traditionally, the criticism of literary translation is characterized by general and impressionistic comments on style. By studying different types of foregrounding in "The Garden Party" written by Mansfield, a great master of style, and by comparing its three Chinese versions translated by Xu Zhimo, Tang Yuncong and Zong Pu respectively, the present thesis attempts to stress the importance of foregrounding, proposed by Geoffrey Leech, in shaping the style of a literary text and to justify the validity of literary stylistics in literary translation.The thesis consists of four chapters. Chapter I is an introduction. Chapter II refers to literary stylistics, building a theoretical framework for the whole research. Chapter III is the main body. In this part, different sorts of foregrounding, including phonological foregrounding, graphological foregrounding, lexical foregrounding, syntactic foregrounding, and thought presentation are illustrated in literary translation. Chapter IV is the conclusion.In conclusion, since literary stylistics is to seek thematic significance and aesthetic value of literary works, translation in such an approach sets its goal to transfer equivalently both of them from the original text. By applying literary stylistics to the process of translation, the translator not only translates the form, that is, the linguistic features of the original text, but also its content, namely, the thematic significance and aesthetic value embedded in the linguistic features. As a result, the form and the content could be well combined in the translation. Foregrounded features represent the style of a literary text. Therefore, to translate various types of foregrounding in a text is to translate its style.