On Foregrounding And English/Chinese Literary Translation

The aesthetical power of a literary work lies not only in the message it conveys, but also the ways in which the message is expressed. In literary works, some language features stand out because they violate the norm of standard usage and such violation is the foregrounded language. Foregrounding, the unexpected departures from the accepted norms, is a technique often employed by writers to express a particular style or imply some intention in literary works. As translating consists in reproducing in the receptor language the closest natural equivalent of the source language message, first in terms of meaning and secondly in terms of style, it is necessary for translators to take the linguistic foregrounding factor into account in the process of literary translation in order to render the style and intention in the original.However, the foregrounding in translation is often overlooked or sometimes mistaken for the linguistic differences between English and Chinese, which leads to some insufficient representations of the foregrounded features in English/Chinese literary translation. The author finds that the problem actually is caused by translators'ignorance of the function of foregrounding in literary translation, their failure to recognize foregrounding across languages, and failure to represent foregrounding appropriately. The dissertation therefore attempts to answer the two questions: how to recognize foregrounding and how to represent it in the target language.With respect to foregrounding recognition, attention should be paid to foregrounding not only in one language but also across languages because translating is a dynamic communicative process involving two language systems. Within a single language system, two types of foregrounding—qualitative foregrounding and quantitative foregrounding can be recognized through observing the deviation and overregularity respectively. And in order to recognize foregrounding across languages and cultures, unintentional foregrounding is differentiated from intentional foregrounding because it is the latter that should be rendered in the target language.As for foregrounding representation, different strategies are proposed for unintentional foregrounding and intentional foregrounding in English/Chinese literary translation. Unintentional foregrounding, automatically caused by the differences between the source and target language systems, bears little relation to the style and features of the original; so foregrounding avoidance is the major strategy for translators to adopt. Intentional foregrounding can be translated with two approaches: foregrounding reservation and foregrounding transformation. The former reserves the original foregrounded features in the target language by imitating the foregrounding forms in the original, while the latter transfers the original foregrounded features in the target language by creating foregrounding in the target language with different forms from the original. However, not all foregrounded features can be represented and accepted in the target language because of the linguistic and cultural differences in English and Chinese.Based on the analysis of examples taken from English or Chinese literary works, this dissertation provides a tentative study on literary translation from the perspective of linguistic foregrounding theory. It aims to broaden the horizon of translators in cross-language and cross-cultural communication and provide a fresh view on translation studies.