The Reproduction Of Narrative Point Of View And Narrative Voice In Fiction Translation

Narratology plays a very important role in western fiction criticism theory,and introducing narratology into Translation Studies is not new. The commonestarea is fiction translation. Fiction is so highly characterized by its narrative thatwe can say it is narrative that makes fiction fiction.A novel is far more than a story, for its true meaning lies in how to tell thestory. If the same story is told in different ways, different works will begenerated.‘How to tell’ is called narrative discourse in narratology, which oftenshows the writing technique, thematic and aesthetic effects of a novel. Sincenarrative discourse weighs significantly, translating a novel is more thantranslating a story, and it is natural to attach great importance to narrativediscourse in fiction translation. Therefore, as a science studying narrativediscourse, narratology can make a difference in fiction translation.Narrative point of view and narrative voice are indispensable parts ofnarrative discourse, so when translating a novel, in order to reproduce thenarrative discourse, it is necessary to take narrative point of view and narrativevoice into consideration. Narrative point of view refers to whose point of vieworients the narrative perspective, or more simply,‘who sees’, while narrativevoice refers to who tells the story, or more simply,‘who speaks’. Naturally,different points of view will lead to different narrative effects. Traditionally,narrative point of view and narrative voice were confused as ‘who tells the storyis who watches’. Genette is the first scholar to differentiate narrative voice fromnarrative point of view, and he divides narrative point of view (in his words,narrative focalization) into three types. Based on his theory, Shen Dan improvesthe category, providing a classification of four types: zero point of view, internal point of view, first-person external point of view and third-personexternal point of view. Shen’s Typology covers all types of points of viewwithout redundancy. This scientific and succinct typology is the theoreticalperspective of this research.This research analyses the narrative point of view and the narrative voice insome short stories respectively in Taibeiren and discusses the narrative effectsin terms of characterization and development of story. It observes that the authorshows a flexible manipulation of various points of view and voices, such aschange of point of view and blend of voices in characterizing and developingstory. The similar procedures are done again to analyze the narrative point ofview and the narrative voice in its translation Taipei People. It is found thatthrough such translation methods as subtle use of person and tense, the narrativepoint of view and the narrative voice are generally reproduced in the translation.Certainly, there are some inadequate places that can be improved. In addition,the research also finds that some narrative points of view or narrative voicewhich are characterized by the Chinese language can hardly be translated intoEnglish, to which we should pay much attention when doing translation.Through expounding the reproduction of narrative point of view andnarrative voice in translation, it is hoped that translators will pay more attentionto the level of narrative discourse such as narrative point of view and narrativevoice. We suggest that the translator have a certain knowledge of narratology soas to be sensitive to the narrative discourse in the original work, and reproducethe narrative effects as much as possible. It is also hoped fiction critics andordinary readers can criticize or appreciate a novel from the perspective ofnarratology.