A Study Of Zhang Guruo's Translation Of The Dialogues In The Return Of The Native From A Sociosemiotic Perspective

Zhang Guruo is famous for his study and translation of Thomas Hardy. He has translated three of Hardy's masterpieces—Tess of the D'Urbervilles, The Return of the Native and Jude the Obscure. Besides translating Hardy's literary works, Mr. Zhang also does a lot of research on English literature. So that is why he is called "the authority on Hardy" and "Hardy's bosom friend in the East" by China's Western literature research circle, and his translations are honored as "models of translations" by Hongkong critics, making an indelible contribution to the propagation of English literature in China. They enjoy distinctive features, such as his translating "genuine translated text" for "genuine original text", use of four-character phrases and repetition, translating with annotation and dialect-for-dialect translation. This paper is aimed at probing into Zhang Guruo's translation strategies of the dialogues in The Return of the Native from the sociosemiotic approach.Fictional dialogues play a crucial role in portraying personalities, constructing plots, explaining the background, advancing stories and creating the whole aesthetic effects in a fiction. As Norman Page (1988: 3) presents, "Dialogues in a fiction may nevertheless help to develop a 'plot' and enrich the reader's understanding of 'character' and 'background' whilst at the same time no other manner of presentation could provide."Firstly, giving a brief introduction to Thomas Hardy, Zhang Guruo and his Chinese version of The Return of the Native, and then through a systematic analysis of the characteristics and roles of the dialogues in The Return of the Native, the paper shows that the dialogues in The Return of the Native have such characteristics as colloquialism and plainness, vividness and individuation, richness and colorfulness, and humorousness. Furthermore, they play a vital and irreplaceable role in portraying personalities, constructing plots, advancing stories and reflecting English culture, especially on the study of "novels of character and environment" of Hardy—"a rural writer". Therefore, a study of translation of the dialogues in The Return of the Native helps to improve the translation quality of English literature so that the cream of English humanities, literatre and arts, can be better assimilated by the Chinese people.However, when it comes to writings discussing the translation of fictional dialogues, there are only a few, not to say those discussing the dialogues translation in The Return of the Native. But it is noticed that some papers discuss fictional dialogues translation from various angles and employ theories from other fields, such as domestication, foreignization, proportionate domestication and foreignization functional equivalence, literary stylistics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, and aesthetics. This thesis, by employing Morris's three distinctions of meanings of linguistic signs, namely, designative meaning, linguistic meaning and pragmatic meaning, and the translation criterion of "correspondence in meaning and similarity in function" advocated by Professor Chen (陈宏薇1998: 66), analyzes Zhang Guruo's Chinese version of the dialogues in The Return of the Native from the sociosemiotic perspective.The essence of sociosemiotic translation is "correspondence in meaning and similarity in function" , which also emphsizes that any signs carry meanings. The similarity in function can only be attained through the reproduction of a meaning in the target language; as translation means translating meaning, the classification of meaning becomes the most prominent issue. Correspondence in meaning refers to correspondence in designative meaning, linguistic meaning and pragmatic meaning. Similarity in function means similarity in expressive function, informative function, vocative function, aesthetic function, phatic function and metalingual function. By analyzing Zhang Guruo's translation of the dialogues in The Return of the Native, the thesis explains how to achieve the criterion of correspondence in meaning and similarity in function in the course of translation from the three aspects of meaning respectively. Designative meaning refers to the relation between linguistic signs and their referents. After studying Zhang Guruo's translation of the dialogues in The Return of the Native, the thesis concludes that such translation strategies as literal translation, free translation, literal translation plus annotation and dialect-for-dialect translation are mostly used in translating designative meaning. Linguistic meaning is built on the relation of signs to each other, existing on the three levels: phonological, lexical and syntactic levels. The linguistic meaning of the dialogues in The Return of the Native mainly exists on lexical and syntactic levels. On the lexical level, it is chiefly reflected in such rhetorical devices as repetition, use of reduplicated words and four-character combinations, and on the syntactic level, in the sentence patterns of parallelism and division. Pragmatic meaning is built on the relation of linguistic signs to their interpreters. The pragmatic meaning of dialogues in The Return of the Native mainly includes three aspects: associative meaning, affective meaning, and stylistic meaning. In a word, through systematically studying Zhang Guruo's Chinese version of The Return of the Native, a successful translation, the thesis points out that, in the course of translation, the focus should be put on the reproduction of the main functions and meanings of the original, and Mr. Zhang made it, abundantly reflecting his idea of translation: "genuine translated text" for "genuine original text".Besides, because loss of messages in translation can only be minimized but not completely avoided, so the thesis also probes into the causes for the loss of designative, linguistic and pragmatic meaning in Zhang's version of The Return respectively.