“Chatting Style” Translation:A Case Study Of The E-C Translation Of Philip Larkin's Jill

As a narrative genre, fiction has its own discourse characteristics and a more objective and scientific analysis of these characteristics could be achieved by methods originating in narratology and stylistics. Moreover, it richens fiction translation with method from combining analysis of both narratology and stylistics. Jill, Philip Larkin's novelette, mainly depicts some students in the University of Oxford, who come from different family background and social status. Jill's “chatting style” leaves readers deep impression. However, its simple syntax and words contain rich and complex meaning. In addition, in the “chatting style”, sometimes it has amazing words in the whole novel. Therefore, to a great extent, the success of the novel translation is closely related with the translation of its discourse style.Based on the combination of stylistics and narrative text analysis, the paper is to explore how to keep the “chatting style” of Jill in translation. The author of this thesis tries to analyze the text from three aspects. First, from the change of narrative time, in the part of flashback, the author chooses to replace discourse time, while in the part of premise the author reserves its discourse time. This method is helpful to present a clear time sequence in the translation for readers. Second, from the translation of narrative perspective, the author tries to keep the original third-person perspective in translation and to make the story more objective and reliable. However, as for the first-person perspective, the author replaces the first-person with third-person perspective to make readers identify with the characters. Finally, from the relationship between readers and the writer of fiction, as for the simple words, the author tries to retain the original simple words to accurately express the original intention and to establish the conversant and equal relationship. Moreover, as for the word order of the simple sentences, the author adjusts the word order to meet the idiomatic expressions in the target language. The three translation strategies are to represent the original features and style and provide some references for future translation.