A Study On The Stylistic Reproduction Of Hulanhe Zhuan

As the basic form of expression, language is the carrier of emotion and cognition of awriter, which can reflect the writer’s writing style and the artistic style of his/her work.Different writers have different artistic styles, and different artistic styles present differentlanguage features.Xiao Hong, as a modern Chinese female writer, has a keen feeling of art and has herown stylistic awareness, by which she forms her unique writing style, known as "Xiao HongStyle". This kind of style is between novel, prose and poem, and breaks the narrative modesof traditional novels by adopting narrative way of autobiography, narrative rhythm of proseand narrative style of poetry as well as extraordinary language expressions.Hulanhe Zhuan, one of the representative works of Xiao Hong, is quite a unique workin the artistic form, mainly reflecting in its local, prosaic and oral features, and its uniquelanguage expressions. Many scholars have conducted studies on Hulanhe Zhuan. But incontrast to the original work, few scholars have specially studied its translation, Tales ofHulan River. By searching the existing studies on Tales of Hulan River, it can be seen thatmany are centered on the cultural perspective, for example, cultural default, folkloretranslation and cultural hybridity. By now, no translation studies on Tales of Hulan River fromthe perspective of stylistics have been systematically conducted. The artistic features whichare reflected from the writer’s style are of great importance to a literary work. Therefore, thekey to the success or failure of fictional translation depends on, to considerable extent,whether the translator could successfully reproduce the style of the original work. Therefore, the thesis attempts to study whether the English version of Hulanhe Zhuan reproduces thestyle of the original work and expects to provide reference for the studies on Chinese-Englishfictional translation as well as criticism of fictional translation.By adopting the analysis methods of literary stylistics, the thesis is intended to conducta contrastive analysis of the style of Hulanhe Zhuan and its English version from the threelevels of lexis, syntax and figure of speech for the purpose to explore if the thematic meaningand literary effects motivated by the language choices adopted by the writer are realized bythe translator in the process of translation and the stylistic style are reproduced. If not, whatcauses the losses of literary effects?Through analysis, it is found that there exists phenomenon of deceptive equivalence inthe above three levels in the English version Tales of Hulan River. Therefore, the Englishversion fails to fully reproduce the style of the original work. It rightly conforms to theevaluation of "he couldn’t always translate the complex prose rhythm of the original work"made by Theodore Huters in the book review of Tales of Hulan River. The reason, on onehand, rests on the translator’s translation principles and guiding ideology of taking theoriginal work as the standard in his early stage of translation, which make him put moreemphasis on the representation of the thematic meaning of the original work and ignore therelations between specific language forms and their stylistic effects. On the other hand, takingthe differences of Chinese and English into consideration, the translator makes intentionalrewriting of the language forms for the purpose of corresponding with the reading habits ofthe targeted readers and providing convenience for them to read and understand. However, thetranslator overlooks the losses of the literary effects of the original work caused by hisintentional rewriting.