A Comparative Study Of Two Chinese Versions Of The Wizard Of Oz From Perspective Of Gestalt Psychology

Gestalt psychology belongs to the line of humanism psychology in scientific psychologysystem. Studies on psychology began in Ancient Greece and Rome, but the study of the fielddeveloped into an academic discipline only in the second half of the nineteenth century,which is very similar to the development of translation study. Although practice of translationcan be traced back to the time of BC, the discipline of translation study did not begin until thesecond half of the twentieth century. Another similarity between Gestalt psychology andtranslation study is that both of them are interdisciplinary, which makes it possible to applyGestalt psychology to translation. In this paper, interdisciplinary method is used and someconcepts are borrowed from Gestalt psychology to try to explain some phenomena in thetranslation of children’s literature. Based on this, this study is conducted and some pieces ofadvice are given.Although translation study has been greatly promoted after experiencing “linguisticturn” and “cultural turn”, it still has limitations. Considering this, many scholars begin to turnto the basic nature of translation and make suggestion of introducing theories from otherdisciplines. Jiang Qiuxia, as the representative of those who apply Gestalt psychology toliterary translation, has made great achievements in this field. Following Jiang Qiuxia, somescholars have used Gestalt psychology in poem translation, drama translation and prosetranslation. However, barely has the theory been used in the field of the translation of children’s literature, which is also an indispensible part of literary translation.This paper mainly uses principles of perceptual organization and field theory in Gestaltpsychology to do comparative study of two Chinese versions of The Wizard of Oz, which hasepoch-making significance in the history of American children’s literature. In chapter3, thepaper gives an introduction to the core theories of Gestalt psychology, which tells that thewholeness is not equal to the addition of all parts and the parts cannot explain thecharacteristics of the wholeness. According to these theories, the case study is conducted andit is divided into three parts. The first part uses the core theory to explain differences oftranslation in coherence between two adjacent chapters and puts forward concepts like“original field” and “target field”. The second part mainly compares different characters’tones in which the author’s emotion should be embodied and finds that the use of modalparticle s can help promote dynamic tendency towards perfection. The third part comparesthe translations of images in the two Chinese versions and points out “unfoldedimage-Gestalt” for the translation of children’s literature on the basis of Jiang Qiuxia’s“image-Gestalt”. In addition, as Gestalt field is dynamic, the translation of the same imagecan be different with plot going on and people’s emotion toward the image changes althoughthe original images stay the same.After the study, we find that Zhang Jianping’s version is doing better in coherencybetween chapters and sentences by using strategies like repeating information in the formerchapter, adding new semantic information and adding conjunctions. Ma Ainong uses a lot ofmodal particles to make new information easy to be understood and to make every charactervivid by highlighting their personalities. Ma Ainong is also doing better in translating images’names, motions, and conversations. These three things can help make images more lively andcomplete and therefore promote the field’s dynamic tendency towards perfection.