On The Phenomenal Effect Of Literary Translation: A Multimodal Perspective

Literary translation, as an integral part of translation studies, has long been the subject of debate among scholars at home and abroad and has been dwelt upon from various perspectives. However, few scholars study literary translation from the view of multimodality. C urrent research on multimodality focuses on systemic functional grammar ’s approach to multimodal discourse, but the present research aims to study literary translation from the phenomenal perspective of multimodality.Literary works are rich in description of sensory experience, namely, experiential words that possess phenomenal meaning, so it is of significance for translators to reproduce the phenomenal meanings of experiential words in the target texts and achieve what we call phenomenal effect. The realization of phenomenal effect refers to the fact that the translator should translate so that the phenomenal effect of the translation on the target reader is roughly the same as that of the source text on the source reader. The author believes that the concept of “phenomenal effect” sheds new light on both the theory and practice of literary translation. A comparison between two different translations of the novel Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is made to explore how to achieve phenomenal effect in literary translation at the lexical level and the discourse level.An empirical study on advanced EFL learners is carried out to figure out their overall ability to achieve phenomenal effect in literary translation, and the correlation as well as the difference between their comprehending ability of experiential words and their corresponding translation proficiency. Statistical analysis reveals that 1) advanced EFL learners’ overall translation proficiency of experiential words is slightly above average, and little difference can be found among individual advanced EFL learners; 2) there is a positive correlation between their comprehending ability of experiential words and their corresponding translation proficiency; 3) advanced EFL learners have better performance in the comprehension of experiential words than the translation of experiential words.