Study Of The Representation And Loss Of Defamiliarization Of Fortress Besieged From The Perspective Of Translation Aesthetics

Fortress Besieged is a great novel written by famous Chinese scholar Qian Zhongshu. Since its firstpublication, it has been most enthusiastically received by readers. It has been translated into many languages andattracted a lot of foreign readers. Its use of language has reflected the author’s tactful skills of manipulatinglanguage. Humor, satire, witty remarks, and special figure of speech as well as other means of artisticexpressions are perfectly combined in this great novel. Among them, a lot of defamiliarization is employed tomake the expression more attractive and create special artistic effects, which constitutes the unique style of thisworks. The defamiliarization carries much aesthetic information and greatly enhances the aesthetic value of thenovel.Defamiliarization is a concept of literature and art theory pointed out by Russian Formalism. According toRussian Formalism, the basic characteristic of literature works is literariness. Literariness has the most aestheticvalue and which reflected in authors’ painstakingly chosen defamiliarization devices. Defamiliarization devicesrefer to the fact that the writer deliberately creates some uncommon expressions in the process of literarycreation in order to achieve the unexpected effect of strangeness and novelty by prolonging readers’ aestheticenjoyment. Defamiliarization is not only what writers seek for but also what readers expect. At the same time, itis a force to put forward the development of literature. In this sense, the success or failure of literary translationdepends on how translators deal with the defamiliarization of the source texts into the literary translations.However, there is a tendency in the current translation field that translators pay more attention to the contenttranslation than the form translation, which cannot make the original distinguishing feature of defamiliarizationrepresent in the translation. Therefore, studying on how to represent the original defamiliarization devices cancontribute much to reflecting the particularity of the literary translation. Scholars in translation field at home andabroad have made some constructive studies on how to preserve the original defamiliarization devices. However,there are few studies on the origin, on the specific features and on the representation for them.Based on the fundamental theory in translation and defamiliarization study, this paper attempts to apply LiuMiqing’s translation aesthetic theory as the theoretical framework, from the translation object, translation subject,translator’s initiative, aesthetic psychology and the general rules of aesthetic representation to systematicallystudy and discuss the representation and loss of defamiliarization of Fortress Besieged in the target language, onthe following three aspects: language and stylistic hybrid, the special rhetoric devices and the unique coinedwords. Through the analysis of the source and target text, the following conclusions are drawn: The translatorswere fully aware of the importance of the defamiliarization and attempted to use many translation methods torepresent it in the target text. For the metaphor, pun and most of the coined words, with the literal translation anddynamic imitation, the defamiliarization and the aesthetic value are successfully represented; For puns, almostall of the defamiliarization is lost due to the insurmountable differences between the English and Chineselanguages; For language hybrid, the translators directly changed the multilingual texts into monolingual text intarget language, only marked multilingual language with italic, thus the author elaborately designed languagebarrier disappeared and the loss of the defamiliarization is inevitable; For the stylistic hybrid, the translatorschanged the multi-stylistic of vernacular Chinese combined ancient Chinese into modern English, the aestheticvalues of ancient Chinese of appropriateness, beauty and compactness and the special beauty of images createdby ancient Chinese poems are inevitably lost.The purpose of the thesis is to draw the researcher’s attention to this important linguistic phenomenonthrough the analysis of the translation of defamiliarization in Chinese literary works and to help the translatorbuild a clearer purpose during their translation thus to improve the quality of translation and represent the uniqueoriginal style and artistic feature as well as comprehensively present the rich connotation of Chinese classicliterary works to western readers.