Foregrounding Theory And Novel Translation-An Empirical Study On Students Translation

From the perspective of foregrounding theory, this empirical research investigates whether Chinese students can detect the foregrounding in the original text and whether they can translate those foregrounding devices properly into Chinese contexts. Through the problems and trends found in students' translation process and translation products, such as stylistic sensitivity, text analysis strategy, applications to literary translation teaching have been made.This research employs instruments -three different novel excerpts which have foregrounding devices in different levels and the respective questionnaires -to examine students' translating and translation problems. Subjects are required first to translate the novel excerpts, and then to finish the questionnaires. Altogether, three surveys are conduced.The postulates in van Peer's 1986 experiment are used to design questionnaires. Evidences for judging whether students have detected the foregrounding are students' responses to certain questions in the questionnaire which were designed according to the parameters "Strikingness" and "Importance" selected from van Peer's 1986 experiment; Judgment about whether students has translated the texts properly is made by comparing students' translations with the standard translations which are suggested by the author after the "translation-oriented analysis" of the texts from the perspective of foregrounding theory.Through quantitative and qualitative data analysis and case study, this research concludes four findings: 1. Low detection percentage; and the percentage of students who detected lexical parallelism and semantic deviation were larger than that of those who detected deviation in the form of illogicality; 2. The need to reproduce the original foregrounding giving way to "expressiveness" in the source text; 3. Some students translated properly even without detecting the original foregrounding; 4. Students employed different translation approaches to translating foregrounding on lexical and semantic level.With those findings, applications to literary translation teaching have also been made: 1. Attaching more importance to fostering students' sense of appreciation of literary forms; 2. Making the advantage of Stylistics to complement the teaching of translation; 3. Adopting "Emancipatory Translation" approaches; 4. Diversifying translation quality assessments.