Strategies For E-C Translation Of Foregrounding In Holidays On Ice

Season’s Greetings to Our Friends and Family and Dinah, the Christmas Whore are selected from the famous writer, David Sedaris’ short stories, Holidays on Ice. He has successfully depicted a series of absurd stories during the Christmas season in a satiric way. Foregrounding is a core feature in this novel, occupying a large part of whole contents, embodied in sound, words, sentences, rhetoric and written form. Foregrounding is defined as artistically motivated deviation. This deviation violates the normal rules of usage and so strikes the readers’ attention as unusual. How to reproduce foregrounding in translation is very important and that was the thesis tried to figure out.Based upon former studies of foregrounding, this thesis explored its concept and classified it and applied it into translation practice. First, this thesis reduced foregrounding of the novels to five levels of language: sound, vocabulary, syntax, rhetoric and graphology. Then, the thesis cited Mr. Liu Miqing’s translation strategies that corresponding, recasting and decoloring to guide and analyze foregrounding translating. Thus, the thesis takes effort to avoid translation of deceptive equivalence and maintain the foregrounding effect of the source text as possibly as much in target text to attain equivalent literary and stylistic effects. The present applied study on translation strategies of foregrounding language in Holidays on Ice will become a good exemplary for translators to reproduce the functional effects of the original text and achieve the communicative purpose.