Foregrounding Theory And Its Application To The Translation Of Novels

Foregrounding is a concept that is originally derived from pictorial art. The function offoregrounding is to attract the audiences’ attention so as to achieve certain expected artisticeffects that make the persons or things around backgrounded. The paper makes a review onlinguistic foregrounding theory, which includes its development and experts and scholarsboth abroad and at home that have devoted or are devoting themselves to building thetheoretical structure for the research, and then the author makes a brief summary of theirmain research results and achievements in foregrounding theory.For a long time, foregrounding theory has been widely applied to linguistics, stylistics,literary creation and research whereas rarely being employed in translation activities. Notuntil late20thcentury did Ye Zinan propose that this theory can be applied to translationpractice but he only put forward the relevant assumption on foregrounding theory.Basing on English linguist Geoffrey Leech’s deviation theory and Ye Zinan’sassumption on the application of foregrounding theory in translation practice, this paperaims to draw translators’ attention to foregrounding factors concealed in literary works,especially in novels, and to provide some basic means for them to reproduce theseforegrounding features in the target language.This paper attempts to discuss fiction translation by taking examples from DavidCopperfield and Zhang Guruo’s version 《大卫·考坡菲》as research objects. Translatingconsists in reproducing in the receptor language the closest natural equivalent of the sourcelanguage message, first in terms of meaning and secondly in terms of style.(Nida&Taber1969:12) As a linguistic phenomenon with high stylistic value, the form of foregroundinglanguages cannot be neglected, especially in literary works for the reason that most of theforegrounding expressions are intended by the author. It is of great significance to take foregrounding factors into consideration so as to understand a work’s theme, to appreciateits style characteristics and to experience its artistic qualities. Therefore, foregroundingexpressions cannot be ignored when rendering the style in the original work.On the one hand, this thesis provides the way to recognize foregrounding phenomenain the source text in translation; on the other hand, it puts forward some relevant method asreference for translators so as to deal with such foregrounding expressions in the original.