On Translation Of Joyce’s Dubliners From The Perspective Of Literary Stylistics

With the development of modern linguistics, the fields of literary stylistics and oftranslation studies share more and more common ground. The goal of literary stylistics isto search for the stylistic value lying in the language form of literature works. For scholarsof translation studies, one of their primary objectives is to research how to perform a goodtranslation, and stylistic feature of the text is an essential constituent part of all componentsthat should be taken into consideration to achieve this objective. Literary stylistics, as astudy of literary style, is a beneficial tool to spot the "deceptive equivalence" and then toanalyze how to achieve real "stylistic equivalence", thus improving the quality of theliterary translation. James Joyce is famous for the exceptional language style in his works.Dubliners, a collection of short stories, simple in both language and structure, boasts aunique style and plenty of aesthetic values. To fully reproduce this masterpiece intranslation, there are a few points related to these aesthetic values worthy of scrutiny. Thisthesis makes efforts to scrutinize Xu Xiaowen’s Chinese version of Dubliners to examineto what extent it achieves "stylistic equivalence" on different linguistic levels, and attemptsto extend the application of literary stylistics theories to the translation of fictional workswith similar literary styles.In terms of the correlation degree between fictional translation and various theories ofliterary stylistics, this thesis chooses some theories in Shen Dan’s book, Literary Stylisticsand Fictional Translation, as the supporting framework, and according to the practical andspecific language style in Dubliners, this thesis also borrows theories of Leech and Shortfrom their researches of applying literary stylistics into poetry and fiction. The thesismakes a stylistic analysis of Dubliners from the aspects of lexical level, syntactic level, figure of speech, and speech and thought presentation, and meanwhile discusses to whatextent Xu’s translation reproduces the stylistic effects of the source text. Adoptingdescriptive methodology, the thesis gains some research outcomes as follows: firstly,compared with poetic translation, fictional translation is less constrained by interactionsbetween sound and sense or form and content. However, as one of Joyce’s masterpieces,Dubliners owns many poetic values, as are easily seen in poetry, but if they are neglectedby the translator, or if the translator can not find a corresponding expression in Chinese,then these values may partly or even completely lose in the translation. Secondly, becauseof the huge gap between English and Chinese language systems, some stylistic featuresmanipulated by Joyce in this book have no corresponding expression in Chinese, resultingin the loss of aesthetic effects in translation. Thirdly, there is a close relationship betweenliterary significance and linguistic form in prose fiction, so casual changes of linguisticform resulting from the translator’s neglect or incapability may lead to the decrease or lossof literary significance or, in another word,"deceptive equivalence". On account of it, thetranslator is required to improve him/herself the sensitivity to stylistic values and pay moreattention on the interaction between fictional style and aesthetic values in translation.These findings can benefit the translation studies of fictional works of similar type underthe guidance of literary stylistic and they deserve further studies.