A Study Of The Rhythmic Features Of Mrs. Dalloway And Its Translation

Mrs. Dalloway, as Virginia Woolf's stream-of-consciousness novel, has been translated into five Chinese versions in the past thirty years, one abridged and four in complete edition. A careful study of the novel and the translations reviews that though the versions by Mr. Sun Liang in 1988 and Mrs. Wang Jiaxiang in 2001 are already semantically accurate, the poetic and rhythmic language features of the novel remain insufficiently interpreted. The thesis is to make a study between the original and the translated texts, and discuss how to reconstruct rhythms in translation.This thesis consists of three chapters. Chapter I, discusses that rhythms between levels of consciousness bear the functions of cohesion and coherence: continuous rhythms as a method of combining different consciousness in the equivalent conscious level, altered rhythms as an indication of the shifts of consciousness and angels. Thus the rhythmic forms should be transplanted into the target text so as to preserve the cohesion. Chapter II, discusses the depictive functions of rhythms: smooth rhythm used to describe ordinary consciousness, quick rhythm used in objective description, soporific rhythm to represent dreams, caesural rhythm to describe insanity. Thus, these distinctive features should be reconstructed accordingly so as to give full representation of different consciousness. Chapter III, studies how to replant the rhythms and their aesthetic functions. Our suggestion is that the appropriate reconstruction of the rhythms can offer a smooth rhythmic text, can provide intensive emotion, can foreground vivid images, and can reproduce a poetic novel.In conclusion, translators of such a novel should pay attention to the following aspects: the sequence of sentences, the repetition of sentence structures, the length of phrases, the choice of diction, the use of punctuations, the cadence between substantives and auxiliary words, and the alternation of rhythms.