Stylistic Markedness And Numerical Equivalence Value Evaluation

During the last many years, scholars have well developed English translation theories and some of them are quite influential. Literature translation evaluations become multi-dimensional, many of which are just essayistic or impressionistic. They have applied theories but no quantitative analyses. This thesis tries a new way to apply quantitative analysis to evaluation of literature translations, that is, to set stylistic markedness grade indices, and to apply the combination of both stylistic markedness theory and Numerical Equivalence Value method to judge the stylistic conformity degree of three translation versions of Love of Life. The concepts of stylistic markedness and Numerical Equivalence Value were published in the year of 2002 and 2005 by two scholars separately. Many people have done researches to use combined ways of translation theories, but to employ the above two methods to give quantitative analyses is new, and that is where the creativity of this thesis lays. The author chooses three translations of Love of Life, a work whose translations are not that frequently evaluated by others, because many translations have already had too many comments. The specific literature translation evaluation process works like this. Firstly all the possible stylistic markedness points in either the source text Love of Life and its three translations are selected out, and every point must have its corresponding counterparts in the other three texts. Stylistic markedness points include those lingual stylistic counterparts with either strongly marked(M++), or marked(M+), or slightly marked(M-) or even unmarked(U) language phenomenon. Then we set the value of each point in source text to be ten cents, then the scores(M-value) of its counterparts in the three translations are given according to their stylistic markedness deviation degree. The points that belong to the same stylistic item get an average as the item value. If there is any misinterpretation, one cent is taken each time it happens. With compensation value finally we count the total value of the three target texts. The text whose total is the highest achieves the best stylistic markedness equivalence effect. Then we get the conclusion that the translation by Wei Lan and Dong Jie is the best on the whole. Love of Life is a successful sample for us and it is just a beginning, and the combination of stylistic markedness theory and Numerical Equivalence Value method deserves further research and application.