Translation Of Defamiliarization In Literary Works: A Case Study Of Catch-22

Viktor Shklovsky, a representative of Russian formalists, raised an importantconcept of defamiliarization in his essay “Art as Technique”. According to someRussian formalists, the most important feature of a literary work is ‘literariness’,which is realized through the device of defamiliarization. Therefore, the concept ofdefamiliarization is of great significance in determining the value of literary work.However, as a literary theory, for a long time defamiliarization does not receiveenough attention from translators. Yet the object of literary translation is translatedliterature. If there is no ‘literariness’ in the translation of a literary work, there is nodoubt that the translation is a failure. Therefore the translation of the device ofdefamiliarization in the original work is of great importance, and it determines theartistic value of the translation. The novel Catch-22, a magnum opus of Joseph Heller,is not only an anti-war novel, but also a famous novel of black humor. There areplenty of devices of defamiliarization applied in the novel, such as itsnon-chronological story telling order and its languages. Therefore Catch-22is chosenas the case in this study. In this thesis, three different translations of Catch-22will becompared to see how to represent the devices of defamiliarization from the originalwork, and then come up with a few translation methods for representing device ofdefamiliarization in translation. Thus more attention will be drawn to the concept ofdefamiliarization in the field of translation.