A Study On The Translation Of Wang Zengqi's Poetic Novels From Functional Stylistic Perspective

Today,fictional translation is believed to include two aspects:conveying meaning and reproducing style.On how to retain the style of translated novels, scholars hold different opinions.Some of them focus on the evaluation of stylistic reproduction.For instance,Shen Dan published her book in 1998,which made her the first Chinese scholar to analyze the reproduction of fictional stylistic features from literary stylistic perspective.From then on,more and more papers are devoted to retaining stylistic features in translation,which have enriched fictional translation studies.However,few scholars have noticed the rendering of stylistic elements in Chinese poetic novels,which are of great importance in modern China.These novels focus not on the details of our daily life,but on our inner feeling.Their authors depict the fictional world in brief,rhythmic,and exquisite language,and give us such hints as imagery to the theme.In other words,these novels are called poetic because of the beautiful language,indeterminacy,special images and implicit meanings in them. They are as romantic as poetry,some of which can not be understood at once,yet can be interpreted from many angles.But till now few papers have paid attention to the translation of Chinese poetic novels,let alone the evaluation of translation quality.In view of the situation,this paper takes Hallidayan stylistics developed by Leech and Short as the theoretical framework,to study the reproduction of poetic features in Wang Zengqi's novels. According to functional stylistics,language performs three different functions,that is, ideational,interpersonal,and textual functions.Based on them,this paper analyzes the rendering of Wang's poetic novels from the aspects of phonology,lexis,syntax,image, figure of speech,speech presentation and point of view,to see how translators reproduce poetic features of Wang's novels.During this process,this paper tries to find proper methods to retain various poetic features as well as feasible ways to improve the translation quality of Chinese poetic novels.Besides,through close reading of the Love Story of a Young Monk rendered by Hu Zhihui,the paper wants to see whether this rendering is still a poetic novel in target readers' eyes. This paper holds that the successful rendering of poetic features in poetic novels calls for reasonable interpretation of a certain author's stories.To achieve this aim, translators should first make great efforts to comprehend authors' poetics,which has a great impact on their favorable stylistic strategies;then they should bring their subjectivity into full play and have more interaction with authors and readers,in order to improve their rendition;thirdly,they had better learn more about Chinese and western poetics,so as to find ways to integrate traditional Chinese poetic features with the English language.The author here hopes that this study can help to improve the translation of Chinese poetic novels,attract more foreigners to read them,and pave the way for future translation studies of poetic novels.