A Comparative Study On The Stylistic Features Of Two Chinese Versions Of Bacon’s Essays From Contextual Perspective

As one of the hot issues in stylistics research, stylistic feature is a vitalcomponent of discourse analysis. In these years, with the incorporation of relevantdisciplines into stylistic studies, more and more scholars concentrate on the relationbetween text and context and set stylistic analysis into a much wider network ofcontextual factors. Based on context theory, this thesis takes Bacon s Essays as theobject of study. With the original stylistic feature analysis as the starting researchpoint, two Chinese versions by Shui Tiantong in1958and Cao Minglun in1997arecompared and analyzed in stylistic features with contextual analysis. This researchfirst introduces the previous studies on the translation of Bacon s Essays and pointsout that the researches on its stylistic features and their translations are not done fromthe perspective of context. Then Francis Bacon, his Essays and the two Chineseversions are presented briefly. The classification of context, stylistic analysis modeland the relationship between stylistic analysis and context are focused next. ChapterFour deals with the study of stylistic features of Bacon s Essays, consisting of fourlevels: lexical features, syntactic features, rhetorical features and textual features.From this research, context is not only the external factor influencing the author andreaders to make stylistic analysis, but also internalization factors penetrated in thewhole formation of literary stylistic features and in the whole processing of stylisticanalysis. The last chapter makes a comparative analysis of the two translations instylistic features from contextual perspective. Differences of the two translations inthe four levels are described and explored in detail with many typical examples.According to the comparative analysis, Shui Tiantong put more emphasis on thereproduction of original stylistic features while Cao Minglun attached moreimportance to target language features. The translation differences are closely reltatedwith some contextual factors, such as different transltors backgrounds, theirrespective historical backgrounds and so on.