Evaluation Of Literary Translation From An Interpersonal Perspective

Mood and Modality are two key systems to realize the interpersonal function of our speech because they make the proposition and proposal interactive and argumentative. Literary language comes from people's daily talks, but they are artistically processed by the writer to compose an autonomous work with content and style. By studying the Mood and Modality of the protagonists' talks in literary discourse, we can get a clear picture of their social background, identity, personality, as well as their interrelationships.Ideally, there is a one-to-one relationship between the speech function and mood type, e.g. a statement is to be realized by a declarative mood; a question by an interrogative mood, etc. However, in literary discourse, the characters more often than not disobey these rules and thus create the metaphorical meaning. Besides, the addressee's choice of mood is supposed to cooperate with that of the addresser so as to ensure a smooth communication, e.g. an interrogative is responded with a declarative answer, a declarative is received with acknowledgement. However, it seems in practical communication that these rules are created to be broken. An interrogative may be answered by challenge, and a declarative may meet contradiction. This phenomenon of non-cooperation not only creates the image of the character, but also helps to develop the plot of the story. Each one of us has a particular way of talking, e.g. favor for a particular phrase, mood type or modal verb. These habitual manners form a kind of cohesion in the dialogue. In this thesis, the author would take a close look at those non-grammatical phenomena of language and the translation of them in the hope of finding the best way of preserving these values and thus offer some tentative findings to translation and translation assessment. In the author's point of view, these incongruent and non-cooperative linguistic phenomena, as well as the coherence collectively create the literary effect of foregrounding which bear on to the style of the whole work. The translator has no responsibility and right to make up for them since it would bring nothing but damage.As for Modality, its systematicness is realized in the reiteration of modal operators and value polarization in one speaker's talk. By oberserving these features, it is easy to find the personality of a speaker and the interrelationship between them.A good translation is supposed to preserve the metaphorical correspondence between speech function and mood types and thus ensure an intact interpersonal value. If the mood types betwee the addresser and addressee are not cooperative, the translator has no responsibility and right make up for it since this is where the writer's intention lies. One speaker's choice of mood i relatively stable, based on the fact that a person's speech style is more or less shaped by his soci; and natural living environment. The cohesion or reiteration of one or two mood types in speaker's speech should be reflected in the target text. The coherence of Modality is exhibited i lexical reiteration and the trend of value polarization. A good translation is supposed to reflect th coherence of modality realized by lexical reiteration. The Chinese language also has a set of mod(?) devices with three levels of value. Therefore, the Chinese modal operators with the same value(?) that of the English ones should be adopted to reflect the trend of value polarization in a person speech.