The Reproduction Of Leisure Style In The Translated Versions Of FSLJ

Inspired by Hazlitt's and Lin Yutang's discussion on familiar style, taking Fu Sheng Liu Ji (浮生六记, referred to as FSLJ in the paper) together with its two translated versions (Six Chapters of a Flouting Life and Chapters from a Floating Life: the Autobiography of a Chinese Artist) as example, this thesis puts forward a notion of leisure style, and explores how to make use of stylistic methods to reproduce the leisure style in translation.Based on Leech and Short's checklist containing four categories under the general headings of lexical category, grammatical category, figures of speech, and cohesion and context, the author of the thesis analyzes the leisure style of the original work and explores how the two English versions reproduce the leisure style at lexical, syntactic and textual levels. The author of FSLJ employs simple and natural words, colloquial words and modal particles at lexical level, four-character structures and run-on sentences at syntactic level, and a novel petal-structure at textual level, to express the whole gamut of emotions from happiness to sorrow. The two translators, Lin and Black manage to reproduce the original style to some extent. Based on this case, the author of the thesis comes to the following strategies:At lexical level, words of Anglo-Saxon origin are employed to translate the simple words; transliterating with notes and literal translating are applied for colloquial expression; various grammatical patterns such as emphatic structures, exclamatory sentences and rhetoric questions are utilized to express all kinds of mood of the modal particles. At syntactic level, in translating the four-character structures, flexible translation of concrete and abstract words must be taken into consideration; as for the successive use of four-character structures, non-predicate forms and simple clauses are adopted; and the Chinese run-on sentences are reorganized in structure and translated into simple clauses and loose sentences in English.At textual level, reorganization of the paragraph according to the English patterns and representation of the petal-structure help to reproduce the leisure style.Due to the difference between the English and Chinese languages, different linguistic forms are employed for the same stylistic feature, even there are variations for the same feature within the same language. In the translating process, a good command of both the source and target languages is required in order to choose an optimal method to reproduce the original style.