From Conceptualmeaning Translation To Flavor Translation

Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles is his masterpiece that has enjoyedlong-lasting and widespread popularity in the world. Tess, Angel, Alec and Tess’sfather have their idiolects differ from each other greatly owing to their personalities,educational backgrounds, experiences and other character-related factors. In this novel,the protagonists’ idiolects are characterized by Wessex dialect, culture-loaded wordsand various sentence structures. The use of dialect exposes the author’s ingenuity inshaping up the characters, because it not only helps create a related social and historicatmosphere but also benefits the building up of the characters. As for theculture-loaded words, they are the linguistic conveyors and markers of variouscultures. Culture-loaded words are the key as well as the difficult points ofcommunications. It is inevitable that characters in the novel communicate about thosethings that only exist in their cultures and their expressions are not always the same.Therefore, how to translate those culture-loaded words in characters’ idiolects withoutsacrificing the images of characters is worthy of being discussed. Speaking of thesentence structures, it is sometimes difficult to keep them when they are transferred toanother language. Apart from the content of sentences, the sentence structures alsoplay an important role in displaying characters’ mood. However, due to the intrinsicdifferences of English and Chinese languages, the sentence structures are hard to keep.How to keep the information without distorting the structures to better portraycharacters is a question that deserves contemplation.Jin Yuelin is a famous philosopher. He carves out a chapter in his masterpieceThe Theory of Knowledge to elaborate his own unique and distinctive views abouttranslation. Jin proposes two translational strategies—translating the conceptualmeanings and translating the flavors. Translating conceptual meanings requirestranslators to render the concepts and ideas of the original texts, while translating theflavors requires translators to render the interest and emotions. The translation of theidiolects needs to meet two requirements. There have been many valuable researcheson the style and aesthetics of the original novels and their translated versions, which lays solid foundations for future studies on idiolect translation from differentperspectives. However, there are few researches on the translation of the characters’idiolects from the perspective of Jin Yuelin’s views. In addition, applying his views totranslation studies is very meaningful and beneficial for the representing images ofcharacters.This paper categorizes the characteristics of the idiolects in Tess of thed’Urbervilles and matches them with corresponding examples. Eminent translatorsZhang Guruo and Sun Fali deal with the idiolects of the protagonists in this novel in apraiseworthy way. The comparative studies on their versions with help of Jin’s viewscan catch glimpse of their artful treatment with the idiolects, which benefits the futurestudies on the rendering of characters’idiolects.