The Application Of Literary Stylistics In Translation Practice

The author translated the first three sections of a contemporary American fiction The Turner House as the practice project. It is the first published fiction of Angela Flournoy, an African American woman writer. There are many "foregrounding" expressions in the novel:in the respective of register, there are dialogues with distinctive features, since the characters are of different races and classes; at lexical level, expressions against normal thinking patterns occur frequently; at syntactic level, there are special sentence structures and expressions. To better convey the stylistic features of the original text into the target text, the author, by applying literary stylistics, analyzed the original text and the translated versions produced in the process.Integrating the advantages of both linguistics and literary criticism, literary stylistics uses objective analytical methods of linguistics and subjective literary attainments of literary criticism to explore into the aesthetic effect and thematic meaning of literary works. Therefore, it has significant meaning to literary translation. From a perspective of practice, the author used analyzing methods in literary stylistics that are closely related to the translation project, to conduct analysis at register, lexical and syntactic levels. At register level, "field" "'tenor" and "mode" were analyzed in each chosen dialogues; at lexical level, oxymoron, repetition and transferred epithet were analyzed; at syntactic level, periodic sentence, redundant encoding and sarcasm were analyzed. Through the analysis, the author thought deeply about the writer's intention behind "foregrounding" expressions, and their artistic and thematic functions. After the analysis, the author assessed whether these functions were conveyed into the translated versions, and revised the versions that did not meet the standard. Through specific example analysis, this thesis demonstrates that in translation practices, literary stylistics can make the target text more equivalent to the original in stylistic value.