| Style is regarded as a kind of vague spirituality, which involves the writing features of a writer, the choice of words and building of sentences, figures of speech and how to design the text structure etc. On one hand style reflects the writer’s personality, literary attainment and the choice of themes; on the other hand it is affected by cultural and social aspects. As the translator hardly goes through the same experience with the original writer, the translation of style is difficult to be achieved. Nowadays, there are some controversial issues about style:such as the translatability of style and how to represent the original style. Whether the style is translatable or not has been discussed among scholars, some scholars advocate the untranslatability of style because style is closely connected with language, and different language cannot convey the same style. Meanwhile, other scholars believe as style is closely related to content, once the content is translated into target text and the style is represented subsequently. The author of this paper holds the view that though it is difficult to represent the original style perfectly, the translator can represent the original as much as possible.The work of prose pieces, Gan Xiao Liu Ji, is a memoir of some kind, which is written eight years later after the cadre school experience. It records the detailed life in the cadre school, and its name imitates Shen Fu’s Six Chapters of a Floating Life. After its publication in1981, it has received great attention at home and abroad."Pervades one with a sense of sorrow and loss; we lament as she does but do not feel dejected, we sense her indignation at being wronged but find in this no hate or reproach. Every word is eloquent in its sincerity and truthfulness." commented by a Chinese writer. Simplicity and plainness of language is known as the low-key style. The style is not only her writing style, but also the living style of her person. This work has been translated by Geremie Barne, Howard Goldblatt and Djang Chu respectively. They have endeavored to represent the original low-key style. Meanwhile, the one translated by Howard Glodblatt, with natural and simple language, he strives to represent the style of the original text.This thesis begins with the introduction of the research, which contains the points and views about the style of the theorists from home and abroad, and then discusses the translatability of style in detail. Then elaboration is made on the introduction of Liu Miqing’s Stylistic Theory. From the aspects of formal markers and non-formal markers, detailed comparison has been made by the author of the paper to analyze the style representation of the three English versions, which comes to the conclusion that Glodbaltt’s version has achieved the goal of proper translation in terms of phonological markers, register markers, syntactic markers, lexical markers, textual markers, markers of figures of speech and mood in the original text, and the writer’s disposition etc. It has adopted the apropos language to represent the style of the original text. In the end, the author of the paper further discusses the translatability of style:a successful style translation involves aspects of the writer’s disposition and the translator’s qualities. It is expected that this contrastive study of the three English versions can throw light on future studies about the theories and practices of reproducing style in translation. |
