Iconicity In Stylistic Translation Of Foregrounded Texts Acomparative Study Of The Two Chinese Versions Of The Complete Fairy Tales Of Oscar Wilde

In recent years, studies on language and literature show that there is amotivation in the structure of language to a large extent. The main points ofIconicity Theory are: language symbol has resemblance between its sound, form orstructure and its signifier, meanwhile the iconicity principle is also the mosteffective means to achieve stylistic features. The theoretical significance ofsyntactic iconicity in literature and literary translation is that it integrates languagemechanism with artistic effect to make the text enjoy the stylistic interpretation of“meaning is beyond words”.This thesis mainly focuses on the children’s literature translation under theguidance of Iconicity Theory and makes comparative analysis between the fairytales by Oscar Wilde and their two Chinese versions by Ba Jin and Wang Lin. Asthe masterpiece of world literature, Wilde’s fairy tale can be reputed as a modeland representative of children’s literature with its poetic and beautiful language.Ba Jin is an important figure in both writing and translation in Chinese literaturehistory, so his translation of Wilde’s fairy tales has great value; Wang Lin is also awell-known scholar studying contemporary children’s literature, and histranslation of Wilde’s fairy tales has become widely popular. The thesis, throughcomparing the two Chinese translations with the original version, analyzes thedemonstration and application of iconicity principle in the two Chinese versionsand explores its guiding role in reproducing the stylistic value of the original text,aiming to re-present the stylistic features of foregrounding text through theequivalence of “stylistic markedness” and “literary expressiveness” in thetranslation version of children’s literature.The thesis employs both quantitative and qualitative analysis methods and thecorpus as a research tool. With the English version of Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales andtheir two Chinese versions as the subject, comparison is made in terms of the fourmain syntactic iconicity principles, quantitative iconicity, sequential iconicity,symmetric iconicity and the iconicity of markedness, to explore the two major issues:1. Whether does the phenomenon of the application of four main principles ofthe Iconicity Theory exist both in the original and two translational versions? Whatare the principles of Iconicity Theory which are widely used in the original andtwo translational versions through quantitative and qualitative analysis?2. According to quantitative and qualitative analysis, what are their disparitiesof application of each principle in different versions? What are the reasons of thedisparities?Previous research on the application of principles of Iconicity Theory intranslation mainly focuses on poetry and literary translation, and most of thestudies are qualitative ones. Up to now, little research is made on the application ofthe principles in children’s literature translation. This thesis compares the twoChinese versions of Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales through quantitative and qualitativeanalysis. Based on the statistics of the two Chinese versions, it is found that boththe original and Chinese versions boast iconicity features in language use, and thetranslation by Ba Jin employs more iconicity principles, especially prominent inquantitative and symmetric iconicity, which also better reflect the aestheticstylistic features of the original text. Seen from both the qualitative andquantitative analysis, Ba Jin’s translation is more faithful to the original one, inwhich more sentence patterns conforming to quantitative and symmetric iconicityprinciples like parallelism and antithesis are used to better reproduce the stylisticfeatures of the original text. Ba Jin re-presents the unique stylistic features ofWilde’s tales through language forms, but his translation may also cause somepuzzle to young kids because of some long and difficult sentences; compared withBa Jin, Wang Lin uses a variety of words in his translation. As a modern writer,perhaps his purpose is to attract the kids, but some of the unique charm in theoriginal text is lost to a certain degree. In a word, from the analysis of the originaland Chinese version, it can be seen that the main principles of syntactic iconicityare widely used in children’s literature and its translation, particular the use ofquantitative and symmetric principles of iconicity can highlight the unique stylistic features of children’s literature, and can be a guidance to children’s literaturetranslation to make it convey the unique charm of the original language to childrenreaders in a better way.Finally, it summarizes the theoretical and practical significance of studyingthe stylistic translation of children’s literature from the iconicity aspects. Thisresearch not only provides a new perspective to the study on the stylistictranslation of children’s literature, but also expands the research vision of iconicity,offering thoughts to systematic and in-depth studies in the future.