Translation Of Allegorical Fiction From The Perspective Of Literary Stylistics

Aiming at interpreting literary works and exploring their underlying thematic meaning and aesthetic value through the combination of linguistic forms and contents, the theory of literary stylistics is a new discipline developed on the basis of linguistics and literary criticism. The work Literary Stylistics and Fictional Translation composed in 1995 by domestic scholar Shen Dan initiated the study on literary translation at home from the perspective of western literary stylistics. Nevertheless, such kind of researches are relatively few, and most are devoted to its application on a specific novel with fewer systematic translation studies on a particular literary style in a wider range such as drama translation, essay translation and the translation of a special genre in fiction, resulting in the fragmentation and simplification of current researches. In order to enhance translation studies from the perspective of literary stylistics, this thesis attempts to carry out an innovative translation research on a specific kind of fiction, for example, studies on the translation of allegorical fiction. Firstly, a theoretical foundation will be laid for later study through the author's elaboration on some core concepts of literary stylistics, including “deviation”, “prominence”, “foregrounding” and “deceptive equivalence” as well as the differences and inner associations among those concepts, followed by a discussion on the essence, connotation and distinct stylistic features of allegorical fiction as a special fiction style. By setting Nineteen Eighty-Four, the well-known allegorical fiction of George Orwell with great irony and prophecy on politics, as an example and adopting the two Chinese versions translated by Dong Leshan and Sun Zhongxu respectively with high recognition, the author will conduct a comparative translation analysis based on the parts with foregrounding features, namely, the motivated prominence and apply the analysis mode “Contents(fictional facts) +Stylistic Value = Total Significance” to put the theory of literary stylistics into translation study in a more comprehensive way.Through the research, a final conclusion can be drawn as follows: first, the distinct stylistic features of allegorical fiction manifested both in thematic meaning and in linguistic forms coincide with the objective of literary stylistics to explore the thematic meaning and aesthetic value of literary works, showing that the perspective of literary stylistics has a great potential and applicability for the study on allegorical fiction translation. Second, a large number of linguistic forms in allegorical fiction Nineteen Eighty-Four conform to the standard of “foregrounding features” and “deceptive equivalence”, and the later comparative translation analysis has proved the explanatory power of literary stylistics in allegorical fiction translation study. Third, after an in-depth comparison between the translated version of Dong Leshan and that of Sun Zhongxu, the author has managed to summarize the translation strategies and techniques adopted by the two translators in handling those subtle and unconventional linguistic forms with profound thematic meanings, discovering that, in most cases, they tended to use the strategy of literal translation and even employed “word for word” approach for the linguistic forms completely deviated from the norm to reserve the extraordinary significance contained in unconventional structures as much as possible.It is hoped that the shallow research of this thesis will give some enlightenments on future scholars, enable coming researchers to carry out translation studies on various kinds of texts and give them further insights into the significance of literary stylistics in guiding the process of translation so that they will be more sensitive to the foregrounding features in literary works and apply proper translation strategies to reserve distinct stylistic value.