On The Reproduction Of Defamiliarization In Hamlet

Literary translation often distinguishes itself from non-literary translation in translation studies for the fuzzy concept of literature. Russian Formalism claims it is literariness which makes specific works become literary works that serves as the nature of literature. Defamiliarized forms elaborately employed by authors exhibit literariness to a great extent, because the essence of defamiliarization lies in updating our life and the timeworn feeling towards things and the world, freeing people from the narrow daily relationship and stylized restriction, and renewing familiar sight that people are blind to through unique, creative, and twisted ways. Therefore, it is the artistic form of defamiliarization that facilitates the realization of literariness.Defamiliarization is of particular importance to manifest the value of literary works. In literary translation, the quality of translations thus depends on the attitude and translation strategies towards the defamiliarization in the source text. In the translation field, defamiliarization theory has been given high priority, and two study approaches are mainly formed:one observes the defamiliarization as a translation strategy which can be creatively employed by translators in the target text instead of absolute faithfulness to the original text due to the creativeness of literary works; the other regards defamiliarization as the target of translation, focusing on the ways to deal with these familiarized devices. And we cling to the latter.Hamlet, a treasure of English literature, is of great art value. This monumental masterpiece is highly defamiliarized from its language, narrative techniques to the textual layout. These defamiliarization features which need to be fully represented in its translation constitute an immortal artistic charm of Hamlet.The author of this thesis adopts Zhu Shenghao’s version and Bian Zhilin’s version for a comparative study. Defamiliarization is chosen to be the theoretical paradigm to discuss the reproduction and regret of the E-C translation of Hamlet. The thesis first reviews the previous study of defamiliarization in literature, literary translation and Chinese versions of Hamlet. Then it tentatively defines the defamiliarization in the literature field and discusses various defamiliarized techniques and functions of them in literature. Moreover, the necessity and the possibility of reproduction of defamiliarization in literary translation are probed into and the reproduction of defamiliarization in the E-C translation of Hamlet is discussed from the phonetic, lexical, syntactic and textual level. Finally, the regret of the reproduction is talked over and the root of regret is analyzed from the differences in language generative mechanism and aesthetic consciousness between English and Chinese, and translators’ different concept of translation.Enormous research has been carried out on the E-C translation of Hamlet; however, research from the perspective of defamiliarization is scarcely seen. It is hoped that the translators can lay more stress on the defamiliarization in the original text and search for better techniques and strategies to reproduce it instead of simply familiarizing it.