Stylistic Maintenance In Fictional Translation

Stylistic maintenance is one of the aspects that a literary translation is aimed to achieve and assessed by, fictional translation included. However, this type of research concerning stylistic translation before the 1980s particularly in China largely relied on intuitive and impressionistic judgment. Systematic research of stylistic assessment in fictional translation is still not gaining much concern, which might be a lack of theoretical guidance for translational criticism and the enhancement of stylistic awareness among translators in the practice of fictional translation as well.Thanks to the development of linguistics and stylistics that develops based on the former, whether a translation maintains the style of the original text can be judged by virtue of employing concepts and theories from stylistics. According to modern stylistics, style can be measured through structural analysis of the text. As for this, English stylisticians Geoffrey N. Leech and Michael H. Short has put forward a checklist of linguistic and stylistic categories that are placed under four headings, i.e. lexical categories, grammatical categories, figures of speech and cohesion and context, which I am going to employ in the present study and examine its feasibility when applied to fictional translation in terms of style.Under the guidance of their checklist, the research is conducted based on an English realistic novel Tess of the d'Urbervilles and its two Chinese renditions translated by Zhang Guruo and Sun Fali respectively so as to examine whether or not and how feasible stylistic theory can shed light on stylistic maintenance evaluation in fictional translation and figure out the principles that govern the stylistic maintenance in it.