On Suspense Story Translation From The Perspective Of Gestalt Image

Daphne’s suspense story My Cousin Rachel focuses on the description of Philip’spsychological suspense towards Rachel with the background of Cornwall manor. Thestory fully demonstrates the unique artistic glamorizing atmosphere with thedevelopment of the story and the characters’ fates. Thus a large number of readers havebeen attracted by the suspense story whose writing characteristics have been affectedby the Gothic novels besides the romanticism.Gestalt psychology was first proposed by the German psychologist MaxWertheimer in1912. Gestalt means the whole and it emphasizes the holisticcharacteristic of the experience and the behavior. Evolving from the Gestaltpsychology the principle of gestalt image was first put forward by Jiang Qiuxia in herwork in2002. It stresses the integral structure and reproduction of the original artimages in the process of literary translation. Meanwhile it helps to provide a newperspective and a systematically scientific approach for the literary translation.The principle of gestalt image is applied in this thesis to analyze those suspenseimages in the Chinese version My Cousin Rachel, such as the murderer image, theimage of Ambrose’s death, the image of letters, the image of Rachel’s frittering, theimage of herbs, the image of Rachel and Signor Rainald and the image of beggar girl,etc. At the same time the thesis focuses on how those suspense images of the originalwork are successfully reproduced in the Chinese version. And from the study comesthe conclusion that in the practice of suspense story translation, suspense images arebetter reproduced with the help of the principle of gestalt image from the perspectiveof the aesthetics, the author as well as the translator. Compared with LanguageTransformation Mode(Nida) and Cognitive Thinking Patterns(Bell), it attaches moreattention to the integrity and reproduction of the original work in translation. It ishoped that the thesis will be of some help to the theoretical study and practical work ofthe suspense story translation.