A Study On The Style Of Translation Of The Catcher In The Rye From The Perspective Of Figure-Ground Theory

Cognitive stylistics is a new branch of linguistics first developed around1990s andit is a combination of cognitive science (linguistics) and stylistics. It is amuti-methodological theory, and it offers a new viewing angle for analyzing andinterpreting literary works. Figure-Ground theory, FG theory for short in this thesis, isone of the most important theories in cognitive stylistics. Jerome David Salinger’smasterpiece The Catcher in the Rye as a postwar American literary classic, it has madecertain achievements from translation norms, translation strategies and so on by manyscholars. But the research about the novel style is still inadequate; especially thetranslation study cannot explain the similarities between the Chinese translation and theoriginal in terms of style. The thesis offers a FG framework for literary analysis, whichincorporates important notions from FG theory, such as identification of FG,interpretation of FG and the relationship between them to analyze the style of theoriginal and the two translations, and to find how the two translators interpret the styleof the original at lexical level, syntactic level and rhetorical level and so on byFigure-Ground theory. And what are the similarities and dissimilarities between theoriginal and the two versions, and which version is closer to the style of the original byFigure-Ground theory and what are the reasons. At the same time, the thesis adopted theanalytical model is Short’s stylistic analytical model to analyze the two versions’ style.It came to the conclusion that the two translations basically showed the style of thesource text. But Shi Xianrong’s version was closer to the original style, although someexpressions were not in line with modern target reader’s speech habits. Sun Zhongxuchanged the source text into the version of speech habits and expressions which weremore easily accepted by the modern Chinese readers.So this thesis attempts to study The Catcher in the Rye from cognitive stylistics toexplore the style translation of the two versions. Therefore, the thesis is a tentativeanalysis in this respect but enlarges the field of cognitive stylistics and Figure-Groundtheory. And it is hoped that this thesis can lay the foundation for the further study of TheCatcher in the Rye and provide a new perspective for translation criticism, applying findings to theoretical research and teaching.