A Comparative Study Of Three Chinese Versions Of An Ideal Husband

Literary stylistics, as a discipline mediating between literary criticism andlinguistics, has played an important role in literary translation and literary criticism.It provides a scientific method for the analysis of linguistic form that generatesaesthetic effects and thematic functions, helping the translators improve theirawareness of the unity of content and form and deepen their understanding andappreciation of literary works. In literary translation, the translators can guide theirtranslation practice and achieve both semantic equivalence and stylistic equivalenceon the basis of stylistic analysis. In the field of translation criticism, literary stylisticshas become an important instrument for the evaluation of the translated texts.This thesis attempts to undertake a comparative study of three major Chineseversions of An Ideal Husband from the perspective of literary stylistics. The play isone of Oscar Wilde’s four social comedies, which is well-known for its witty andhumorous language rather than the peculiar plot and characterization. Contributing tothe unique feature of Wilde’s language, a variety of rhetoric devices and wittydiction are ingeniously employed in this text, which helps to bring Wilde ever-lastingreputation and equal literary status similar to that of George Bernard Shaw.Nevertheless, although this play has been translated into various Chinese versions,little attention has been paid to them in the field of translation studies, not to mentionenough efforts from literary stylistics.In the light of the checklist for stylistic analysis proposed by British scholarsLeech and Short, this thesis focuses on the Chinese versions by Yu Guangzhong,Zhang Nanfeng and Qian Zhide. Based on the framework of linguistic and stylisticcategories, stylistic analysis is conducted under the lexical categories, syntacticcategories and figures of speech, exploring whether the similar stylistic features havebeen reproduced and whether the same or similar stylistic effect or equivalence hasbeen achieved in the three Chinese versions. After detailed contrastive analysis, thethesis finds that both Yu Guangzhong and Zhang Nanfeng, owing to their stylistic sensitivity, achieve overall stylistic equivalence or effect in their versions byreproducing most of the stylistic features of the source text. On the contrary, QianZhide, whose translation of this play was popular in the early1980s, not only fails torealize basic stylistic equivalence of the source text, but also commits some mistakesconcerning comprehension in his translation. This positive analysis of the thesisconfirms that it is both feasible and necessary to undertake textual analysis byapplying literary stylistics to translation practice and translation evaluation, if wewant to avoid deceptive equivalence and improve the exactness and credibility oftranslation evaluation.