On Characterization In The Chinese Version Of In The Garden Of Beasts

In literary writing, character depiction is the major task for an author. Though literary translation is different from literary writing, it requires translators to grasp the features of characters deeply and reproduce them accurately. The ways to depict characters are various, including describing their languages, appearances, actions and psychological activities. Translation is to find out these features of characters and reproduce them faithfully in the target language. Only by doing so, translators could present a faithful translation with aesthetic effects. In the memoirlike biography, In the Garden of Beasts, the author has unfolded before us a picture of characters with distinct personalities based on their social status, certain situations and relationships between each other.In order to introduce Erik Larson’s work to Chinese readers, the writer chose the third part of the book to do translation. This part consists of ten chapters. The whole process of translation was carried on under the guidance of Yan Fu’s translation principles—"Faithfulness, Expressiveness, Elegance". How to reproduce characters in the Chinese version was the key problem the writer had to deal with.This report is made up of four parts, namely task description, process description, case analysis and conclusion. In the case analysis part, the writer focuses on the discussion on how to accurately reproduce characters in literary translation at graphological, lexical, syntactic and textual levels with stylistics as a tool. At graphological level, the writer pays much attention to the capitalized and italicized words. Being sensitive to the abnormal written forms of language could help the writer fully understand the author’s implications; at lexical level, the writer attaches great importance to the words with affective meaning and stylistic meaning and tries to replace them with the closest natural equivalents in the translation; at syntactic level, the writer mainly talks about the translations of elliptical sentence and parallel structure. She tries her best to ensure that the style and manner of translation should be of the same character with that of the original; and at textual level, the writer adopts lexical and grammatical devices and bases on the semantic relation within paragraphs to achieve cohesion and coherence. In these ways, a vivid and lively character with distinct and varied personality is restored in the translation.Through this report, the writer wants to point out that translators should pay due attention to the stylistic features of language in literary works, and spare no effort to figure out the best translation methods. In this way, both characters and the literary value of the original works could be represented in the receptor language.