| Great importance should be attached to Chinese literature in the cause of "traditional Chinese culture’s going out". San Guo Yan Yi, one of the four great classical novels in China, is very popular both at home and abroad. It created many classical characters which are known to every household. The study of San Guo Yan Yi and its translation has attracted many scholars in recent years; however, study on its English versions is not as fruitful as other literary classics. Especially, the systematic and in-depth translation study on the characterization in this novel is far from enough. From the theoretical perspective of stylistics, this paper selects two complete English versions. The aim of this thesis is to take literary stylistics as a research perspective in order to find out different methods Robert and Taylor have adopted in the recreation of the original style.Literary stylistics uses modern linguistics as a tool and combines the theories of stylistics to make a research on whether translators have noticed the thematic significance and aesthetic value expressed by language forms. Literary stylistics can help translators grasp the characteristics of novel’s language form, and represent them in the translation so as to keep the aesthetic value of the original work. The paper adopted the approach of literary stylistics, selected some typical examples about the modification of characters in San Guo Yan Yi, and made a comparative study from the aspects of style, morphology, syntax and figure of speech to evaluate whether translators have reproduced the thematic significance and aesthetic value of the original text and whether the remoulding of characters is successful. The paper is to observe different translation strategies adopted by different translators through a comparative analysis of the description of characters’behavior, speech and appearance and so on. The paper will find out the main reason and provide some advice on how to recreate the original style in translation. |
PDF Full Text Request