Application Of Textuality In Fiction Translation

This thesis stresses the application of textuality in fiction translation and makes a comparative study of two Chinese versions of Pride and Prejudice.Translation studies today are a cluster of overlapping perspectives. Over the last three decades, they have been invigorated by new ideas from other disciplines. Translation scholars no longer hesitate to take up these new ideas to research translation. Text linguistics is such a new perspective to translation studies.As a new branch of linguistics, text linguistics focuses on studying the whole process of producing a text. It defines text as a unified whole and a communicative occurrence and holds that each text has its texture which is the property of being a text. Meanwhile, it also admits that both intratextual and extratextual factors can affect the meaning and communicative purpose of the text.The traditional linguistic model of translation studies and evaluates translation only at lexical or sentential level. It adopts a"bottom-up"process where translation starts with words and their discrete meaning, and tries to achieve equivalence at lexical and sentential level. The whole texture of the translation work is thus overlooked. However, text-linguistic model of translation is different. It adopts a top-down process, starting with analyzing the source text as a unified whole and aiming to produce the target text still as an organic whole. It stresses the translation equivalence at textual and communicative level. In this model, translation process can be divided into two stages: text comprehension and text production. This thesis emphasizes that in the stage of text production, the target text should be produced following the principle of textuality.Textuality is an important notion of text linguistics and it refers to the complex set of features that texts must have to be considered as texts. It has seven standards: cohesion, coherence,intentionality, acceptability, informativity, situationality, and intertextuality. Any neglect of these standards will affect the meaning and the communicative function of the text.With the comparison of the two versions of Pride and Prejudice respectively translated by Sun Zhili, and Zhang Ling and Zhang Yang, it is found that Sun's version does a better job than Zhang's in complying with the seven standards of textuality. Through the comparative study, a conclusion is drawn that in translation, producing the target text under the guidance of the principle of textuality will be helpful to translation equivalence at textual and communicative level. That is, it helps to create the functionally equivalent texture in the target text.