Representation Of Narrative Features In The Chinese Translation Of Le Petit Prince

Le Petit Prince, first published in1943, is the most famous novella written by the French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery. It recounts a story of the little prince from a foreign planet. The narrator is "I", a pilot who comes across the little prince in the desert. During the nine days they live together,"I" know the planet and his travel little by little. Later,"I" report the story in memory of the little prince. The fiction is short; the plot is simple and the wording is plain. But it is such a fiction whose publication ranks the second in the world, only inferior to the Bible. In virtue of its popularity, the translations of Le Petit Prince sprang up like mushrooms. In China, only from2000to2005, more than20versions showed up, among which Xiao Wang Zi translated by Zhou Kexi has won high praise. Professor Xu Jun recommends Zhou's version because he deems that Zhou does transfer the essence of the source fiction successfully and creatively. As the fiction is generally defined as a piece of children's literature, the usual starting point of its translation studies is the reception of the children readers. In fact, it can provide pleasure and food of thought for readers of all ages. Its success is normally regarded to result from its philosophical theme, yet it could not be ignored that the narrative features play a significant role in constructing the theme. Thus, the present study takes Zhou's version as an object to evaluate the transference of the narrative features in Le Petit Prince from the aspects of the speech presentation and the narrative point of view which are two important concepts in narratology.Since narratology suggested its name in1960's, it has always been prominent in contemporary literary theories. With its development, narratology has not only deepened and broadened the literary theories, but also provided a fresh perspective for literary translation. The classic narratology emphasizes the text itself and mainly studies the ways in which the story is narrated on the level of discourse, such as speech presentation and narrative point of view. Renette (1980), in his book Narrative Discourse, expounds the two aspects in "narrative mood" as the means of regulating the narration. Leech and Short (2001) make an elaborate classification on the modes of speech presentation, including free direct speech, direct speech, free indirect speech, indirect speech and narrative report of speech acts. Professor Shen Dan (1998) generalizes four types of narrative point of view:the omniscient point of view, the internal point of view (such as the first-person internal point of view and the character's limited point of view), the first-person external point of view and the third-person external point of view.Le Petit Prince is a first-person retrospective narrative with abundance of dialogue, in which thus the first-person external point of view is the regular point of view and the common modes of speech presentation are the direct speech and the free direct speech. These narrative features contribute a lot to the development of the narration. Through the comparative study of the source fiction and its selected version, it could be concluded that Zhou's version, in general, successfully represents the narrative features in Le Petit Prince and achieves the thematic and aesthetical equivalence to the original fiction. The thesis is hoped to provide a narratological perspective in evaluating the translation of Le Petit Prince and facilitate the readers to understand the narrative value of the fiction as well as its thematic value.