Representation Of Stylistic Value In Prose Translation By Pan Wenguo

Selected Essays of William Hazlitt, written by the renowned English writer William Hazlitt, was generally recognized as one of the most successful English prose off its time largely due to its innovative and unique style, which deepens and reinforces the theme. At the same time, it dramatically enhances the aesthetic effect of the text. In traditional prose translation studies, the language form of prose is often neglected, and thus resulted in the loss of the aesthetic value of the original text. The main reason was due to the translator’s ignorance of the aesthetic value of the language form in the original. Therefore, it is necessary to apply literary stylistics into prose translation as literary stylistics is mainly concerned with how the writer’s verbal choices contribute to the content and aesthetic significance of the entire work.The study of style can be simply defined as stylistics. Literary stylistics refers to the school of stylistics whose fundamental aim is to interpret the thematic significance and aesthetic values of a literary text. The combination of literary stylistics and translation study is significantly innovative and enlightening. Although some scholars have made remarkable achievements in this field, still a systematic and profound study on it is unfortunately inadequate.The translator of Selected Essays of William Hazlitt is Pan Wenguo. He is a great translator who received traditional Chinese education as well as modern western instructions. He devoted himself to study foreign prose and the stylistic features of prose translation. Pan adopted different translation strategies in dealing with the original text, it deserves our efforts to analyze different stylistic and aesthetic effects resulting from these different translation strategies in the target language so as to sharpen our translation skills and enhance our stylistic competence.Therefore, this thesis intends to make a tentative analysis of Selected Essays of William Hazlitt translated by Pan Wenguo on the basis of literary stylistics. The author attempts to particularly conduct the style of Pan and investigate his writing features such as the combination of classical Chinese and mandarin, the flexible sentence structure and the faithfulness to the original text. Generally speaking, the style of translator is perceivable in three cases:the plain style, the classical Chinese style and the ironical style. The plain style can convey the original text to the full text. The classic Chinese style highlights the translator’s solid foundation of ancient Chinese through the ability of phrasing and fiction. The ironic style strives to present the artistic sense. Then the thesis explores how the translator uses language form to convey aesthetic values from language and image. The results of the study points out the style of the translation text and aesthetic meaning from the perspective of stylistics, which testifies the necessity of introducing the stylistics in prose translation.In the view of the above, the purpose of the study is to focus on analyzing Pan Wenguo’s translation theory and stressing the style of Pan.The author investigates his writing features such as the combination of classic Chinese and mandarin, the flexible sentence structure and the faithfulness to the original text. A good translation must include elements of both formal and language beauty then it can better fit the theory of literary stylistics. This thesis proved the translatability of style and the representation of the stylistic value based on the exploration of Pan’s translation style.