Liu Miqing’s Stylistic Theory Re-examined By Analyzing Howard Goldblatt’s Translation Of Jiu Guo

Style embodies the spirit of a writer in literary works. It represents thecharacteristics of a writer’s literary creation, including the features of the wording ordiction, the application of figures of speech and also the structure of the work.Therefore, style, as one of the most important characteristics in literary works, shouldbe aware of by both translation practitioners and researchers.However, style is the manner of expression which is influenced by the author’spersonality, literary attainments, writing abilities and so on. These factors are usuallyaffected by cultural, social and political factors to some degree. It is impossible for thetranslator to experience totally the same as the writer does, thus the translation of styleis a hard nut to crack.Mo Yan’s novel The Republic of Wine contains various styles, including cruelrealism, expressionism, symbolism, magical realism, structuralism and so on. Thisstory is translated by American sinologist and translator Howard Goldblatt who ispraised as the chief translator of modern Chinese literature. He has translated morethan forty pieces of Chinese literary works, which has attracted the attention of theAmerican. Goldblatt’s remarkable translation makes an important contribution to thepropagation of Chinese literature in the world.Accordingly, this thesis takes the transltion of The Republic of Wine as the objectof study. It attempts to apply Liu Miqing’s stylistic theory to study the styletranslation of typical writings in The Republic of Wine with the purpose ofdiscovering new viewpoints and strategies in theory and practice and putting forwardcomplementary suggestions to Liu’s stylistic theory. Firstly, this thesis gives an introduction to the development of style and stylistics,it mentions Western and Chinese theories on style and stylistics and demonstrates thetranslatability of style and its limitations, which provides as a theoretical background.Secondly, it focuses on the introduction to the theoretical frame of this thesis:Liu Miqing’s stylistic theory. Liu’s stylistic theory points out that style isrecognizable and the way of recognizing it is mastering the system of formal markersand non-formal markers and grasping the frequency of formal markers andnon-formal markers by analyzing the structure and contents of the original.Thirdly, it is followed by an introduction to Mo Yan’s writing style, the stylisticfeatures of The Republic of Wine and Howard Goldblatt’s viewpoints and strategieson translation. According to the system of formal markers and non-formal markers ofstylistic theory, this thesis illustrates how Howard Goldblatt translates and reproducesthe style of The Republic of Wine.Last but not the least, this thesis endeavors to put forward some complementarysuggestions to the stylistic theory: the translation of style should give first rank toreadability and the target reader. In order to avoid some misunderstandings andconflicts caused by cultural differences, some stylistic features of the original couldbe decolored even neglected on the premise of not affecting the style on the whole.