Application Of Literary Stylistics To The Evaluation Of Fictional Translation

This thesis attempts to investigate the effectiveness and limitations of literary stylistics as an approach to translation study and evaluate style reproduction of the original in the English version of Fortress Besieged translated by Jeanne Kelly and Nathan K.Mao.The definition of style translation in traditional translation theories remains controversial and is far from satisfactory. Furthermore, the description of style and style translation is mainly confined to subjective, abstract and impressionistic comments, which on the one hand heightens to a large extent the expectation for readership's artistic competence and appreciating ability, and on the other hand makes style analysis rely too much on personal intuition without scientific and systematic basis. As a branch of modern linguistics, literary stylistics is characteristic of scientific, objective and systematic theories. Traditionally, however, literary stylistics has been mainly applied to the analysis of poetry, whose short text stretch and obtrusive language features makes a stylistic investigation much more feasible.Therefore, the application of literary stylistic theories to translation study, especially that of fictional style, is creative and innovative.This thesis consists of three chapters: chapter one is literature review, in which theories concerning style translation at home and abroad will be reviewed. Chapter two lays the theoretical foundation for the subsequent case study. A new and tentative method of analysis is provided with style investigation being conducted in three categories: lexicon, rhetoric and syntax. As to the problem of selecting significant language features and segments for analysis, the author specifies the concepts of'foregrounding'and takes it as the criterion of relevance for selection. Chapter three is devoted to the investigation of original style rendering in the English version of Fortress Besieged in the above-mentioned three categories. The author will provide his own version for reference where the translation by Jeanne Kelly is deemed inappropriate and inaccurate.At the end of the thesis, the effectiveness and limitations of literary stylistics as applied to the study of fictional translation and the original style reproduction in the English version of Fortress Besieged is evaluated.