A Stylistic Study Of Big Breasts And Wide Hips And Its English Version

Literary stylistics is a branch of stylistics that studies the way language is used in literary works. It is an interdisciplinary area of study involving literary criticism and linguistic studies. With textual analysis as its focus, literary stylistics takes upon itself to explore the thematic value and aesthetic effects of a literary text against subjective or intuitive interpretations of literary texts. Based on the theory of literary stylistics, the present study focuses on fiction translation, namely, the way artistic features are conveyed in fiction translation by way of linguistic choices at different levels for the demonstration and reproduction of the thematic value and aesthetic effects of original texts. It is hoped that this perspective will contribute to translation studies and provide reference for translation practice.Mo Yan was awarded 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature. Big Breasts and Wide Hips, one of his representative novels, drew great attention from the literary circle and became popular once it was published. It is a novel characterized by its unique stylistic and artistic features such as folklore flavor, carnival language and hallucinatory realism. Its English version, translated by Howard Goldblatt, the foremost translator of modern and contemporary Chinese literature, has been very well received by western readers.The present study is a comparison of the original work and its English translation by Howard Goldblatt from the perspective of literary stylistics, illustrating main points with examples at different levels, lexical, syntactic and rhetorical, with a view to bringing home the strengths as well as weaknesses of the said translation. A tentative comparison reveals that despite some weaknesses the translation as a whole reproduces the stylistic features of the original work in terms of its thematic value and aesthetic effects. This shows the feasibility of applying literary stylistics to fiction translation, thus advancing a more objective and systematic approach to interpreting and appreciating literary works and finally enriching theories or perspectives of translation studies.