Stylistic Reproduction In Biography Translation From The Perspective Of Stylistic Marker Theory

With the development of society and increasing culture exchanges between China and the Western world, biography gradually wins high popularity among people. The most typical feature of biography is the utmost balance between literariness and documentary, which means that the biography is not serious historical material and can provide spiritual and psychological pleasure to its readers. The toughest question in the translation of biography is how to achieve an ideal balance between literariness and documentary. This thesis focuses on discussions about the approaches to reproduce the original style in the translation of biography on the ground of Stylistic Marker Theory.Translation does not mean the sheer changes between two different languages, and good translated works should properly reproduce the original styles. As to the topic of style reproduction, or style translation, scholars from home and abroad hold various standings and some of their opinions are opposite. Some people even argue that style is intangible and cannot be translated for obstacles such as the great differences between languages. However, with examples, this thesis tries to prove that style can be recognized and reproduced with the tool of Stylistic Marker Theory.This thesis firstly discusses the general features of biography, gives an overview of recent research on the translation of biography, and makes an introduction of the case book entitled Sun Yat Sen and China Republic in the part of introduction. The case book, Sun Yat Sen and China Republic, is written by Dr. Sun’s American adviser Linebarger and it portrays the devious revolution life of Dr. Sun to spread the spirit of China’s revolution. This book mainly uses plain and simple words, and specifies with some long sentences and Bible stories. Meanwhile, the book tries to introduce Chinese culture as well. Then this thesis expounds the definition of style from linguistic perspective and literary perspective before gives analysis of the translatability of style. According to Liu Miqing’s Stylistic Marker Theory, stylistic markers contain formal markers and non-formal markers and they can be used as clues to identify the original style of literary works for translators. This thesis chooses4representative chapters as study material to discuss the approaches to reproduce the original style. Some compensatory strategies are used to reproduce the original style to the utmost extent. After all the above analysis, this thesis draws a conclusion that Stylistic Marker Theory can be used as a tool to recognize the original style and a good use of specific translating skills and techniques will help translators to ideally reproduce the original styles in the translated texts. It means that translators should properly supply different translating approaches to remedy the inadequacies of style recognition to reproduce the original style utmost.