On Reproduction Of Original Style In Literary Translation

More and more attention has been paid to the reproduction of literary style in thetranslation field. At the same time, some controversial problems on literary translation havebeen discussed either in the theoretical or the practical field, such as the translatability andreproduction of style. Based on previous studies on style and style reproduction, thisdissertation discusses the relationship between the translator’s style and the style of theoriginal work in translation and further poses the issue of translatability of literary style.Theauthor believes that literary style is translatable and must be translated.The translation of styleconstitutes one of the indispensable parts of literary translation. Whatever approaches taken,whichever theory applied, the focus behind the activity of literary translation is to reproducethe style of the original work.David Copperfield is one of the important works created by Charles Dickens, the criticaland realistic British writer in the19thcentury. It reviews and summarizes his life experiences,reflects his life philosophy and moral ideals and embodies high artistic value.This novel hasmany Chinese versions, in which Dong Qiusi’s version and Zhang Guruo’s version are widelyspread. The past studies of David Copperfield’s Chinese versions primarily focus on thecomparative study of Dong’s and Zhang’s versions or three or four versions from theperspectives of polysystem theory, Skopos theory, hermeneutics and reception aesthetics, theideological manipulation and cultural perspective while there is little comparative study ofDong’s version and Zhang’s version from the perspective of style reproduction. However, oneof the major functions of the literary works is to arouse readers’ inner aesthetic sense, whichlargely depends on the style of the literary works. Therefore, translator’s main task in literarytranslation is to reproduce the original style in the target language. If the translator’s style isvery obvious in the translation or the translation does not appropriately reproduce the originalstyle, the quality of translation will be seriously affected, resulting in the “betrayal” of theoriginal work. For this reason, the reproduction of the original style in the translation of thenovel is very necessary. This dissertation tries to give a comparative study of Dong’s version and Zhang’s version from the perspective of style reproductio, to find the differences and giveevaluation so as to help readers get a better understanding of the two Chinese versions.This dissertation falls into six chapters. The first chapter is the introduction, whichmainly introduces the purpose and significance and background of this study, the content,creative points and the frame of the dissertation. The second chapter mainly discusses styleand style reproduction in translation, including the definition of style, the arguments fortranslatability and untranslatability of style，the importance of reproducing the original style,the relationship between the original style and the translator’s style and the style of DavidCopperfield. The third chapter compares the style reproduction in the two versions from theperspective of choice of words and sentence rearrangement, including the two parts: thevocabulary aspect and the syntactic aspect. The fourth chapter compares the stylereproduction in the two versions from the perspective of the recreation of image of characters,including the style reproduction of description of characters’ appearance, behaviors andindividuality of speech. The fifth chapter compares the style reproduction in the two versionsfrom the perspective of figures of speech, including three parts: simile and metaphor, pun andhyperbole. The sixth chapter is the concluding part. At the end of this dissertation, the authornot only sums up the merits the two translators achieve in their own versions, but also listssome demerits that have been found in the comparative study of the two Chinese versions ofDavid Copperfield, and briefly analyzes the causes resulting in the differences in the twoversions from the perspective of style reproduction and also proposes some expectation fortranslators on the aspect of reproducing the original style as much as possible. To sum up,Zhang’s version is better than Dong’s version in reproducing the original style from the threeperspectives: choice of words and sentence rearrangement, the recreation of image ofcharacters and figures of speech though Zhang’s version is not a perfect one and also needs tobe improved. The finding of this dissertation also proves that style is translatable and can bereproduced well in the translated versions.