A Comparative Study On The Three Chinese Versions Of The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn

Mark Twain’s masterpiece The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a monumentalwork in the history of American literature and the author’s fame is also worldwide forhis employment of various kinds of dialects and creation of the colloquial writingstyle. In China, translation of the novel has begun before the foundation of People’sRepublic of China, and various translations have come into being in an endless stream.However, the reproduction of the original oral style has remained to be the pursuit oftranslators of all times. And their efforts leave much invaluable experience forsubsequent translators.Taking Tytler’s three principles of translation as theoretical framework, thisthesis focuses on a comparative study on three Chinese versions of the noveltranslated by Cheng Shi, Pan Qingling and Zhang Wanli respectively, aiming atshowing each translator’s advantages and disadvantages in reproducing the originalwriting style. This thesis is divided into four parts, namely introduction, literaturereview, a comparative study on three Chinese versions, and the conclusion. And thecomparative study is the main part of the thesis. The research shows that seen fromthe perspective of reproducing the original writing style, all the three translations aredecent ones. But when comes to different aspects of translation, all translators havetheir own merits and demerits due to their differences in times, social backgrounds,and translation methods they use.In this thesis, statistics are added to guarantee the objectivity of the study. Incomparative studies on translations of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, theemployment of Tytler’s three principles of translation is rare and it is the first time PanQingling’s translation has been selected for analysis.Based on a comparative study, this thesis analyzes the advantages anddisadvantages of each translation in terms of reproducing the original colloquialwriting style, in order to help Chinese readers appreciate the ideas and artistic style ofthe original book in a better way and provide some useful suggestions for future retranslation.