Restructuring Foregrounded Syntactic Features Of Ulysses In The Chinese Translation-From The Perspective Of Literary Stylistics

The research explores the restructuring of foregrounded syntactic features of Ulysses in the Chinese translation, in the hope of strengthening translators' and readers' stylistic awareness.Ulysses, a masterpiece of modern fiction, displays remarkable creativeness at all linguistic levels: phonological, lexical, syntactic, and register. This study, however, only fixes at the syntactic level. To be exact, the research explores foregrounded syntactic features and its Chinese translation of the first half of the novel which is called the 'initial style' by many scholars.This research makes a detailed stylistic analysis of two foregrounded syntactic features - unusual subject & unusual word order, followed by a contrast study of their Chinese versions. Unusual subject refers to the use of part of body as the actor/agent. Three stylistic values can be identified or brought out through careful stylistic analysis: (1) the transference of the underlying authorial narrator's attitude towards certain character; (2) the imitation function of the language; (3) the transference of fictional point of view.Unusual word order explores the stylistic values of two features: pre-posed adjunct structure and thematization. In some contexts, the pre-posed adjunct structure serves to highlight the object which is placed at the 'end-focus' position, and in others the state/manner of the action. Joyce's major intension in using thematization seems to lie in its imitation function in depicting the stream-of-consciousness.In view of the stylistic values of these features, they should be restructured in translation. However, our contrastive analysis shows that our current versions still have large room for improvement.Linguistic inventiveness is part of Joyce's artistic ingenuity and the restructuring of foregrounded linguistic features in translation calls for further studies.