Translation Of Fictional Style From The Perspective Of Literary Stylistics

Style translation is an indispensable part in literary translation. Style is the embodiment of the thought of the original works and the revelation of habitual traits of the author. Every writer has his/her unique life experience, personality, thoughts and emotions, which determine his/her choice of diction, syntax, and linguistic forms——that is, his/her writing style. However, traditional translation theories of style are only confined to the remarks, which tend to be abstract, vague, subjective and impressionistic. Especially in the translation practice of fictional style, many translators are apt to rely on the "paraphrasable property" of realistic fictions and thus fail to realize their stylistic values, and therefore "deceptive equivalence" is created and the style of the original text is not faithfully conveyed.Literary stylistics focuses on investigating works’style. The introduction of literary stylistics helps provide more scientific framework for the translation theories of style and enhance the translators’sensitivity to style and their literature accomplishments so as to bring in translations of higher quality.However, most studies carried out from the perspective of literary stylistics have been concerned with poems and little has been done investigating the translation of fictional style. Therefore, with substantial examples chosen from the three versions of Tess of the d’Urbervilles translated by Zhang Guoruo, Sun Fali, and Wu Di, the main part of the paper intends to show, through a detailed stylistic analysis of the original and a comparative study of the three Chinese versions, that some translators have failed to convey the style of the original text faithfully due to their insensitivity to or incompetence in realizing stylistic devices loaded with stylistic values, such as phonology, lexis, syntax, etc. From the perspective of literary stylistics, the paper focuses on the comparative analysis of the stylistic markers at the level of phonology, lexis, syntax and figure of speech, which have embodied the original style reflected in the three above mentioned Chinese versions. The author of the paper finally comes to the conclusion that Zhang’s version surpasses the other two in preserving the original style, which is proved by his style reproduction in terms of phonology, lexis, syntax and figure of speech. The paper holds that stylistic analysis can be applied to literary translation, especially fictional translation, and it also plays a practical role in instructing translation practice and can serve as the criterion to guiding literary style reproduction.