A Literary Stylitic Approach To Style Translation

Style translation is an inseparable part of literary translation. It takes as the central concern the interpretation of the aesthetic value of the original style and the most appropriated adaptation of the translated style to that of the original in the sense of retaining the same aesthetic value. Owing to its close relation to the reproduction of the original aesthetic value or "literariness", the manipulation of it is often taken as the main access to the evaluation of the quality of a literary translation. Given the importance of style translation as such, the general study on it remains comparatively backward, which can be accounted for at two aspects: firstly, there exists broad understanding of style and the definition of it remains controversial; secondly, a scientific and objective approach to the interpretation of style which distinguishes from the traditional impressionistic approach and the descriptively-oriented linguistic approach and gives considerable concern to the 'literariness" of style falls short. The remedy for the inadequacies, the author believes, can be readily sought in literary stylistics. Literary stylistics is an intermediary discipline mediating between linguistics and literary criticism, which attaches equal importance to the description in linguistics and the interpretation in literary criticism. It gives style a scientific and objective description as language choices in actual use. With style and stylistic effects as its objects of investigation, literary stylistics lays emphasis on how writers strive to express thematic meaning and heighten aesthetic effects through linguistic choices. Benefiting from both linguistics and literary criticism, in exploring the aesthetic value of literary texts, literary stylistics can effectively help fend off the impressionistic and subjective tendency that literary criticism is susceptible to so as to achieve utmost objectivity in literary criticism. Applying literary stylistics to style translation can benefit translators in that an enhanced stylistic awareness enables them to be more sensitive to the aesthetic function and stylistic value of linguistic forms, thus helping avoid the loss of stylistic effect in translation. In order to prove the necessity and effectiveness of the literary stylistic approach to style translation, and also to avoid a sporadic argumentation, the research conducts a fiction-oriented case study, where literary stylistic approach is seen to be helpful in the solution of stylistic distortion, i.e. "deceptive equivalence" in fictional translation.The thesis is composed of five chapters. Chapter 1 provides a rough survey on style translation from both oriental and occidental perspectives, presents the aims and methodology of study, and describes the layout of the study. Chapter 2 explores various conceptions of style with the aim to explicate their respective study domains and distinguish the object of investigation in the present study. Taking as starting point the relevant arguments of Leech and Halliday's theoretical model about style, the study regards style as theme-relevant foregrounded language uses, with its congruence with literary stylistics being further explored. This chapter also devotes to the basic concept of style translation and the translation principle applied. Together discussed here includes the significance of style reproduction to literary translation and the insufficiency of general approaches to style study in translation, by doing which the author hopes to bring out the urgency and necessity of the present literary stylistic approach. The approach, however, is not here taken for granted. Chapter 3 focuses on the establishment of the theoretic framework for the legitimacy and feasibility of literary stylistic approach to style translation by exploring comprehensively the nature, goal, and typical analytical model, etc. of literary stylistics. Special attention is paid to "deceptive equivalence", a kind of style distortion prone to be made in fictional translation. To tackle the problem, Shen Dan's stylistic approach is introduced particularly here and serves as the ready methodology for the coming case study. Chapter 4 conducts the case study on Lu Xun's short story "Medicine" and its English versions to justify the literary stylistic approach to style translation. The background exposition is first made to bring out the thematic significance of the work. Then here comes the data collection and stylistic analysis on lexical, syntactic, and textual level respectively where style distortion is prone to be made. Based on the stylistic analysis, the corresponding parts in the English versions are checked to see whether the original stylistic effects are faithfully reproduced in the translation. Chapter 5 serves as the conclusion of the research, summarizing the major findings and pointing out the limitations for future endeavors.