On The Two English Versions Of Lu Xun's Short Stories From The Perspective Of Literary Stylistics

In traditional fictional translation studies, much attention has been paid to transferring the content of the original, while the meaning of the linguistic form is left untouched upon. However, in fiction, writers' manipulation of the linguistic form functions means for various thematic and aesthetic effects, such as efficient characterization, or for making the fictional reality operate more effectively in the work's thematic design. In translation, neglecting literary writers' artistic manipulation of the linguistic form will result in the loss of thematic and aesthetic value of the original. Furthermore, various kinds of "deceptive equivalence", which conveys approximately the same fictional 'facts', but fails to capture the aesthetic effects generated by the original author's formal operation, occur in fictional translation as a result of the translator's ignorance of the aesthetic value of the linguistic form in the original. Therefore, it is necessary to apply literary stylistic into fictional translation as literary stylistics is mainly concerned with how the writer's verbal choices contribute to the thematic and aesthetic significance of the entire work.Lu Xun is a master of language, and his stories are characterized by many foregrounded features. And his stories have been translated into more than a dozen languages. Among these versions, two famous English versions are: Selected Works of Lu Xun (Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang) and Diary of a Madman and Other Story (William A. Lyell). As different translators adopt different translation strategies in dealing with the foregrounded features in Lu Xun's works, it deserves our efforts to analyze different stylistic effects resulting from these different translation strategies in the target language so as to sharpen our translation skills and enhance our stylistic competence.Hence, the thesis applies literary stylistics in assessing the two English versions of Lu Xun's short stories and discusses the translation strategies adopted by the two translators in rendering the foregrounded features in the original and different stylistic effects resulting from these different translation strategies in the target language. It is...