Stylistic Approach To English Translations Of Zhu Ziqing's Prose "He Tang Yue Se"

Through years of development, discussion on style translation is constantly heated by several unsettled issues concerning such aspects as the significance, possibility, and the ways to do it, etc..First and foremost, difficult as it is, the translation of style is a requisite, especially in literary writing. This viewpoint actually is resonated by numerous experts in translation, such as Tytler with his three principles for translation, and Liu Chongde with his principle of"faithfulness, expressiveness, and closeness", all giving evidence to the great attention duly attributed to the translation of style.The concept of"style"can be viewed from two perspectives: linguistic and literary. The former refers to the words, rhetoric devices, sentence structures, text patterns and other related aspects of a text, while the later to the general mood, feeling, atmosphere and so on of the text.Based on the two perspectives arise diverging opinions about the translatability of style. Many scholars advocate the untranslatability of style due to the immense gap between different language systems, and more importantly, to the fact that the literary perspective of style is more difficult to reproduce. Hence their claim that it is very hard or even impossible for two different languages to represent one and the same style of a particular writing. Other scholars think otherwise and regard it to be feasible on the ground that style pertains to the domain of the form of language. Since the form of one language can be converted to another, which is just commonly known as"translation", style is of course translatable. This thesis generally upholds the view that style can only be translated to an optimal degree owing to the great difference and difficulty involved in the process. That is, what should be done is to try best to transfer the style to the maximum, though complete transfer of style is an ideal impossible to be achieved.Then how to reproduce the style in translation? It is proposed in the thesis that the two perspectives of style, linguistic and literary, should be kept in mind at the same time in the process of translation. The model of"stylistic system"put forward by Liu Miqin serves as a perfect example in this field. Thus, based on this system, this thesis is devoted to a detailed contrastive analysis of the two translated versions of the famous prose"He Tang Yue Se", which was written by Zhu Ziqing, a famous writer in China's history. The two English versions were composed by Yang Xianyi and Zhu Chunshen respectively. Here major attention will be put on the translation of the original style with the main concerns being whether they succeed in recreating the style of the source text, and how they achieve it.The thesis begins with a detailed discussion about the concept of style, including the significance of reproducing style in translation on the basis of the thoughts and ideas of some prestigious translators, and a brief introduction to the two perspectives concerning the concept of style, the above two parts being the foundation for further discussion. They are followed by the discussion about the translatability of style and some proposed general principles. Then elaboration is made on the comparison of the two translated versions based on the general principles and some related translation and language principles with the framework derived from the"stylistic system"proposed by Liu Miqing (2005: 241), which also divides the concept of style into two perspectives: linguistic and literary. It is expected that the contrastive work can throw light on future studies about the theories and practices of reproducing style in translation.