Representation Of Defamiliarization In Literary Translation

Literary translation plays a unique role in translation field. Russian Formalism holds that literariness is the core value of literary works which can be properly manifested by the technique of defamiliarization. Familiarization weakens the artistic value of the original works and the target readers cannot savor the aesthetic appeal as much as the source readers do. The representation of defamiliarization contributes more nowadays to the current literary translation. Representation of the defamiliarized parts can not only accomplish writers’artistic pursuits and reflect the professional attainment of translators, but also meet readers’reading expectations and enrich the expressions and culture of the target language. Representation of defamiliarization enables readers to sense the aesthetics of the source language.For a long time, less attention had been paid to representation of defamiliarization in literary translation. Relative researches were also rare. In recent years, however, an increasing number of scholars have attached great importance to this area. The writer of this paper took an interest in it and tried to take the latest bestseller The Painter written by the famous American novelist Peter Heller as a case study to find out the original defamiliarization techniques from the aspects of phonetic level, lexical level, rhetorical level and syntactic level and attempted to analyze the translation strategies to represent these specialties, including literal translation, free translation, word conversion, sentence pattern conversion, analogical translation, compensation of translation and so forth, thus presenting the original aesthetic enjoyment to readers.The current thesis is composed of four parts:Part one is an introduction of the research background. Part two is literary review, including the major views of defamiliarization in both literature and literary translation, the significance of representing the defamiliarized parts in literary translation, the representation strategies of defamiliarization and the writing features of the novel The Painter. Part three is the main part, mainly expatiates on translation strategies in representation of defamiliarization through the case study of The Painter. Part four is conclusion, which summarizes the whole thesis and put forwards some principles to balance the acceptability and defamiliarization.Like any other translation strategies, reproduction of defamiliarization also has its own limitations. It is not an almighty principle in translation studies as the existence of untranslatability. Besides, the extension of defamiliarization is not invariable. The defamiliarized expressions today might become the cliches tomorrow with the emergence of updated defamiliarized expressions so the relating translation strategies should be advanced with the times.