On Translation Of Pynchon’s Writing Styles From The Perspective Of Stylistic Marker Theory

As one of the most complicated problems in translation, the transfer of style in literary works has always attracted the attention of translation scholars. Different translator holds different opinion of the transfer of style. The fierce debates mainly focus on the translatability of style and how to transfer the style of literary works. Since the abstract style is displayed by language, translator can figure out the style of the literary works by detailed analysis of the language markers. The traditional research about transfer of style was subjective, failing to form a scientific and systematic evaluation system. The development of stylistics and linguistics provides a broader perspective for the translation of style in literary works. Under this circumstance, Mr. Liu Miqing proposed the theory of "Stylistic Markers System". He divided stylistic markers into two categories:formal markers and non-formal markers. The former is from the angle of linguistics, and the latter is from the view of literature.The author’s point of view is that it is necessary and important to achieve the reproduction of style in the translation of postmodernism novels. Although different languages and cultures may bring obstacles to the transfer of style, it’s possible for the translator to transfer the style of original works through different translation strategies.Based on the translation practice, the author analyzes the transfer of style in postmodernism novels. The original text is "Low-Lands", a short novel written by Thomas Pynchon. In the study of Pynchon’s writing styles, this thesis tries to analyze examples of lexical marker, syntactic marker, textural marker, and marker of figures of speech in two versions of translation to check whether the style is transferred reasonably during the translation. One version is author’s translation, and the other version is the author’s supervisor’s translation. After the study, the thesis comes to a conclusion that it is possible to reproduce the style of Thomas Pynchon’s novel in translation by adopting different translation strategies. When there are corresponding words in the source language and the target language, corresponding translation strategy can be adopted. When there is no corresponding words in target language, foreignization strategy can be used in translation. Translator can transfer the style of the original works by appropriate creation. The translation of meaning can be achieved through additional compensation method, namely the notes. In addition, considering the acceptance of target language readers, it is better to take the dilution transcoding strategy when deal with the four-letter words in the novel. That is to say, the translator can choose words less vulgar than the original ones. To sum up, translation should not be confined to one translation strategy. In order to achieve the transfer of style in literary works, the process of translation should be guided by different translation theories and strategies.