Re-prescntation Of Defamiliarizations In Yu Jianhua’s Chinese Translation Of Slaughterhouse-Five

As a type of art, the success of literary translation depends heavily on theaesthetic value of the original work, but yet it has a closer relationship with thetranslator’s competence and strategies. Victor Shklovsky, a representative of RussianFormalism, put forward an important theory of "defamiliarization" in1917. It is a termused to describe the capacity of art to counter the deadening effect of habit andconvention by investing the familiar with strangeness and thereby deautomatizingperception. From his viewpoint, the key feature of literature is literariness, which isreflected in the careful usage of defamiliarization devices by authors. Therefore,defamiliarization devices play a vital role in evaluating the aesthetic values of literaryworks. For translators, how to fully recognize and appropriately deal with thedefamiliarization devices in the original works determines the outcome of translation.This thesis researches into both the manifestation of defamiliarization devices inSlaughterhouse-Five and the main methods that Yu Jianhua adopts in his translation tore-present those devices, as well as their effects. Firstly, this thesis elaborates thenecessity and possibility of the re-presentation of defamiliarization in translation. Itpoints out that the characteristics of literature and the translator’s responsibility jointlydecide the necessity of re-presenting the devices. And similarities among differentlanguages and existing successful cases clearly prove the possibility. Next, it analysesthe manifestation of defamiliarization devices in Slaughterhouse-Five and then findsout Slaughterhouse-Five is a highly defamiliarized novel and its defamiliarization ismainly embodied in narrative point of view and language expressions. As for narrativepoint of view, the novel achieves defamiliarization by mingling intrusive point of view,the third person point of view and the first person plural point of view together. As forlanguage expressions, the novelist mainly adopts repetition, pun, invented words,accompanying pictures, comparison and unusual collocation to create a uniqueaesthetic experience. Finally, by making a comparison between the original and thetranslation, the thesis observes that Yu Jianhua successfully re-presents the uniquedefamiliarization devices of the novel via reproducing or imitating, thus making thetranslation version achieve thematic and aesthetic equivalence with the original.The thesis, exploring the defamiliarization in Slaughterhouse-Five and itsre-presentation in translation at both micro and macro levels, exerts some freshinsights into translation of highly defamiliarized literary works. It suggests translatorspay great attention to defamiliarization devices employed in the original whentranslating literary works and should try the utmost to re-present the defamiliarization in the translation by reproducing or imitating.