A Comparative Study Of Two Chinese Versions Of The Return Of The Native From The Perspective Of Literary Stylistics

This thesis attempts to carry out a comparative study of two Chinese versions of The Return of the Native from the perspective of literary stylistics. As a discipline mediating between linguistics and literary criticism, literary stylistics plays a key role in guiding literary translating and criticism. It can provide particular analytic and critical insights for literary translation studies and aims at deepening people’s interpretation of literary works. In literary translation, especially fictional translation, literary stylistic theories and its methods for stylistic analysis are of great help in terms of the transferring of style. In China, scholars in translation circles have made some comparisons and analyses of the translation phenomena and Chinese versions of many literary works with literary stylistics.The Return of the Native is one of the most famous novels by Thomas Hardy, which is of unique and conspicuous stylistic features like colorful diction, flexible and changeable sentences and abundant rhetorical devices. It has been translated into different versions and studied by scholars from various angles in China. But so far, few researches have been specially made to explore the Chinese version of The Return of the Native from the perspective of literary stylistics This thesis is to carry out a comparative study of two Chinese versions of The Return of the Native from the angle of literary stylistics. One version is published by Zhang Guruo in1991; the other by Sun Yu in2006. Based on a checklist of linguistic and stylistic categories proposed by British stylisticians Geoffrey N. Leech and Michael H. Short (1981), this paper aims to make a comparative study of various stylistic features of both source text and target text, and to explore the stylistic effects the two translators have achieved in their translations.The thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter one introduces the background, aims and structure of the thesis. Chapter two reviews the related studies of style translation both at home and abroad, and the studies concerning the Chinese version of The Return of the Native. Chapter three looks at the theoretical framework of this study, which gives a detailed introduction of style literary stylistics and its implication, a checklist for stylistic analysis proposed by Leech and Short and the significance of stylistic analysis in literary translation. Chapter four is the body of the thesis, which primarily compares and analyzes two Chinese versions of The Return of the Native at the levels of lexical expressions, syntax, figures of speech, and context and cohesion to see whether and how the translators reproduce the same stylistic features of the original text in their translations and what effects they have achieved. The final chapter concludes the whole thesis and shows the limitations of present study, pointing out that the study can be taken as a good illustration of the feasibility and necessity of literary stylistics in guiding translation process and assessing translation quality. Translators, thus, should try to equip themselves with adequate stylistic competence and achieve functional correspondence or expressive identity in their translations.