Dialect For Dialect: A Study On Zhang Guruo Translating Thomas Hardy

Zhang Guruo is famous for his study and translation of Thomas Hardy. He has translated three of Hardy's masterpieces-Tess of the D'Urbervilles, The Return of the Native and Jude the Obscure and has been acclaimed an "expert on Hardy", and "Hardy's bosom friend in the East". His translations have been taken as "models of translation", and excellent examples of faithfulness, expressiveness and elegance. They enjoy distinctive features, such as translating idiomatic originals into idiomatic Chinese, use of four-character phrases and overlapping, translating with annotations and dialect-for-dialect translation. This thesis is aimed to probe into the last aspect, the dialect-for-dialect translation.Hardy has elaborated on life with profound and abstruse language in his works, so the difficulties in the process of translation are imaginable. Hardy's language is rich and colorful, using Standard English in common narrations and descriptions, but Wessex dialect in dialogues of people from countryside. Zhang Guruo, with a unique style, has turned Wessex dialect into Shandong dialect, which has proved to be valuable in character depiction and narration. He has developed a school of his own and is a great path breaker in translating.Chapter One sets the scaffold for dialect-for-dialect translation study: the cultural turn in Translation Studies foregrounds the cultural identities and roles of translators in the translation process. Translators' subjectivities have become necessary and important research subjects for translation researchers. Chapter Two briefly introduces the translation achievements of Zhang Guruo, then divides the study on Zhang Guruo in China into five categories and analyzes their contents and characteristics respectively. Chapter Three discusses the relationship between dialect and standardized...