Approaching Style In Fictional Translation

Although translation of style is an important part of literary translation, controversial views do exist as to what style is and how to translate it properly. In practice, due to the"paraphrasable"property of realistic fiction, many translators ignore its stylistic values and only get some kind of"deceptive equivalence", which does not convey faithfully the style of the original text.There is surely an urgent need to expose the"deceptive equivalence"by introducing literary stylistics to translation studies. Taking two Chinese versions of David Copperfield as a case study, the aim of this thesis is to argue the usefulness and necessity of applying literary stylistics to translation studies and particularly the translation of fictional style.This paper first offers a working definition of style, which is of a person's distinctive language habits or the set of individual characteristics of language use, and then argues literary style is translatable and that the objectivity of translation of style is largely based on conventionality rather than on personal factors and that absolute objectivity is impossible. With substantial examples selected from the two Chinese versions of David Copperfield translated by Dong Qiusi and Zhang Guruo, the main part of this paper is dedicated to showing, through a detailed stylistic analysis of the original and a comparative study of the two Chinese versions, that some translations fail to convey the original's style due to translators'negligence or insensitivity to stylistic devices. The stylistic approach, equipped with modern linguistics, may help translators enhance awareness of stylistic features, achieve stylistic equivalence and avoid"deceptive equivalence". This paper finally comes to the conclusion that Zhang's version outweighs Dong's in keeping the original style judging from stylistic equivalence, and proves that the stylistic approach can be applied scientifically and practically to the studies of fictional translation.