The Study Of The English Translation Of Ying Ge Li Shi From The Perspective Of Mona Baker's Narrative Theory

In recent years, Mona Baker?s narrative theory has attracted much attention in the field of translation studies. She creatively draws on the notion of narrative from the social and communication theory into the translation studies, which offers new insights that haven?t been explored in this field before. Mona Baker?s narrative theory was first introduced in 2005, and was further established as a systematical theory in the book Translation and Conflict: A Narrative Account in 2006. In this book, she proposed four key narrative strategies for the reconstruction in the translation process, including temporal and spatial framing, selective appropriation of textual material, framing by labelling and repositioning of participants. During these years, her narrative theory has been widely applied in various genres of text by translation scholars both inside and outside China.The present research attempts to apply Mona Baker?s narrative theory to the English translation of a Chinese novel Ying Ge Li Shi. This novel, written by Wang Gang, was based on his experiences growing up in western China during the Cultural Revolution. It has the strong Chinese characteristics. Comparative analysis of the Chinese novel and its translated version proves that the co-translators adopt all the four narrative strategies proposed by Mona Baker. Firstly, the co-translators apply temporal and spatial framing in order to reproduce the original story and accentuate the narratives in the background of the Cultural Revolution. Secondly, they realize selective appropriation of textual material by using the methods of both omission and addition. Through the way of the omission, the co-translators avoid other countries? political issues, cater to the public narratives in western countries, simplify the original narratives and make the narratives acceptable for the foreign readers. And through the way of addition, they show the twisted human nature, the loss of human right and the sadness of the characters in the specific period. Thirdly, framing by labelling is achieved through the title of the novel, the names of the places and characters, and the shift in meanings, which can change the tone of the characters, alter the readers? evaluation and enhance the narrative effects. And finally, the co-translators reposition the relationship among readers, participants and the translated version through the shift of deixis and register within the text and utterance. Based on the understanding of the original text, the co-translators make these changes in order to lead the readers to keep the reasonable distance with the translated version and understand the relationship among the participants reasonably.