A Study On Retranslation Of Dubliners From The Perspective Of Stylistics

Joyce is a world-famous Irish writer, considered to be the modernist vanguard of the twentieth century. His early work Dubliners, published in 1914, is a short story collection. Joyce organizes the stories around the themes of childhood, adolescence,maturity, and public life, to represent the life in Dublin. In recent decades, Dubliners has been constantly retranslated. The new retranslation was published by Wuhan University Press in 2014 to celebrate the 100 th anniversary of publication of Dubliners.Therefore, Dubliners and its(re)translations1 can serve as sound materials for retranslation studies.This thesis carries out a detailed analysis of Dubliners and its three Chinese versions from the perspective of stylistics. By illustrating examples from lexical,syntactical, and semantic levels, it investigates whether these versions convey the essence of the original text both in meaning and style and revisits the retranslation hypothesis, namely, later translations tend to be closer to the source text. The retranslation hypothesis is formulated on the basis of assumptions put forward by Goethe, Bensimon, Berman, and Gambier. The first chapter mainly introduces the significance of retranslation studies, the reasons for selecting Dubliners and the layout of this thesis. In the second chapter, a literature review of retranslation studies at home and abroad, studies on retranslation hypothesis and relevant empirical researches, and studies on the(re)translations of Dubliners is undertaken. The third chapter is the theoretical framework, which invites the application of stylistics to retranslation studies. The fourth chapter is the main part of the thesis. By illustrating examples, this thesis analyzes three Chinese versions from lexical level, syntactical level and semantic level to verify whether later translations are closer to the original text. The systematic analysis of three Chinese versions finds that, at the syntactical level, the first translation and the version in 2003 are closer to the original text than the version in 2014. Compared to the first translation, the version in 2003 conveys the meaning and style more accurately at lexical and semantic levels. The version in 2014 deviates from the original text both in style and meaning. There are many examples in this case study which do not fully conform to the retranslation hypothesis.