A Study Of The Translation Of Frog From The Perspective Of Foregrounding

The translation of the novel has been an important part of literary translation. Mo Yan’s novels, among others, are the most influential works in China and have been translated into many languages, thus having had greater visibility and recognition in the world. It is important to study how Mo Yan’s idiosyncratic use of language, including his special rhetoric, is rendered into English without diverging too much from the original.Foregrounding is a concept that is derived from visual art. The function of foregrounding is foreground some parts or features of an art piece in order to attract the audiences’ attention, thus setting the other parts or features in the background. The foregrounding theory has been widely applied in linguistics, stylistics, creative writing, etc.However, it is seldom, if at all, used in translation studies.Based on Geoffrey Leech’s deviation theory and Ye Zinan’s application of the foregrounding theory in translation practice, this paper aims to draw translators’ attention to the foregrounding factors in literary works, especially in novels, and to provide some basic methods to reproduce or represent these foregrounding features in the target language.It also offers a way to identify foregrounding phenomena in the source text and then offers methods of translation accordingly.