Reproduction Of Style In Literary Translation From The Perspective Of Markedness Theory Of Style

The stylistic translation of literary works has always been the heated topic in thetranslation arena. Due to the wide distinction between different languages and theirculture, a consensus has yet been achieved in terms of the translatability of style. Mostscholars of the modern translation world incline towards a positive answer to thisquestion, however, due to its obscurity and subjectivity, the identification, measuringand reproduction of style still remains a problem that besets the translation world.Markedness theory was first put forward by the Prague School in the1930s, whichwas originally applied in phonology. Now it has been extended to the study of grammar,semantics, pragmatics, psycholinguistics and applied linguistics, etc, and developedinto a complete theoretical system. The famous British linguist Leech, Geoffrey N.introduced it into stylistics and put forward markedness theory of style in his bookStyle in Fiction: A linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose, suggesting to usestyle markers to measure and even quantize style. In1990s, Professor Liu Miqingbrought markedness theory of style into China and has it developed into two categories:formal markers and informal markers, and came up with the approaches to realizestylistic “adaptability” to the original text, marking a great step in the scientificity ofstylistic translation.This thesis, based on Liu Miqing’s markedness theory of style, attempts to analyzethe English version of Wang Anyi’s Chang Hen Ge—The Song of Everlasting Sorrow:A Novel of Shanghai translated by Michael Berry and Susan Chan Egan separatelyfrom the micro and macro perspectives, aiming to explore the adaptability of theEnglish version to the original Chinese text, and identify the merits as well asdeficiency of markedness theory of style during the process of case study.