A Comparative Study Of The Two Chinese Versions Of Pygmalion From The Perspective Of Literary Stylistics

As a discipline mediating between linguistics and literary criticisms, literary stylistics has caught more attention in recent years from scholars in the area of literary criticism as well as literary translation studies. As literary stylistics can provide translation studies in general and literary translation in particular with analytical as well as critical insights, the present thesis aims at a comparative study of the two Chinese versions of George Bernard Shaw's renowned drama Pygmalion from the perspective of literary stylistics. Despite the popularity of the play in China, so far there are very few studies concerning the Chinese translation of the play, and it is worthwhile to apply the theory of literary stylistics to the study of its two Chinese versions, by Lin Yutang and Yang Xianyi respectively, to evaluate the effects of the two different translators'endeavors. This thesis mainly focuses on analyses of different stylistic features of both source text and target text based on the checklist provided by Leech and Short (1981). According to their framework, detailed comparative studies in the four aspects of lexical expression, syntactical structure, figures of speech, and context and cohesion are carried out on the dramatic text Pygmalion to see how the two translators dealt with the same source text with different approaches, thereby resulting in different translation effects. The study serves as a good illustration of the feasibility of literary stylistics in criticizing and evaluating translation quality. This thesis, after a systematic analysis of the different stylistic effects due to the different linguistic features, concludes that literary stylistics is not only a helpful tool in assessing translated literary works, but also a major consideration of translators in their literary translation.