A Contrastive Study Of The Two Chinese Versions Of Beloved Based On Stylistic Translation

Style embodies the spirit of a writer in literary works. It represents thecharacteristics of a writer’s literary creation, including the features of the wording ordiction, the application of figures of speech and also the structure of the work.Therefore, style, as one of the most important characteristics in literary works, shouldbe aware by both translation practitioners and researchers.However, style is the manner of expression which is influenced by the author’spersonality, literary attainments, writing abilities and so on. These factors are usuallyaffected by cultural, social and political factors to some degree. It is impossible for thetranslator to experience totally the same as the writer does, thus the translation of styleis a hard nut to crack..As a Nobel Prize owner, as well as an African-America woman, Tony Morrisonfully expresses her writing style and her thoughts in Beloved. The research on TonyMorrison in China is just in its initial style. The writing style of this novel includescruel realism, expressionism, symbolism, magical realism, and structuralism and soon. And the description methods include covert narration, and symbolic undertones.Tony Morrison is good at using simple sentence structures and words to express deepmeaning, which gives the readers a rich emotional experience. Wang Youxuan is thefirst translator in China who translated Beloved, and then there come the translation ofPan Yue and Ge Lei. Both of the two versions have their own characteristics, and theyboth want the target language readers to have the same reading experience andemotion like the source language readers. Therefore, this thesis attempts to apply LiuMiqing’s stylistic theory to study the style translation of typical writings in the twoversions with the purpose of discovering new viewpoints and strategies in theory andpractice and putting forward complementary suggestions to Liu’ s stylistic theory.This thesis gives an introduction to the development of style and style translation;it mentions Western and Chinese theories on style and style translation and itslimitations. It focuses on the introduction to the theoretical frame of this thesis: LiuMiqing’s stylistic translation theory. Liu’s translation stylistic theory points out thatstyle is recognizable and the way of recognizing it is mastering the system of formalmarkers and non-formal markers and grasping the frequency of formal markers andnon-formal markers by analyzing the structure and contents of the original. Then it isfollowed by an introduction to Tony Morrison’s writing style and an introduction tothe background of the novel and giving an introduction to the two translation versions. Then this thesis is based on formal markers and non-formal markers, to do acomparative analysis of the two versions in their different translation methods. Thisthesis endeavors to put forward some complementary suggestions to the stylistictheory: the translation of style should give the target language readers the equivalencefeelings with the source language readers. In the procedure of translation, thetranslators should not only pay attention to the reproduction of words and sentencesstructures, but also the aesthetic and emotion of the author, which should be acomplete style of an author and a writing work.