The Fiction Translation Style Of The Two Chinese Versions Of The Kite Runner

The style is always the main and front-burner issue in the field of translation study, of which the definitions are diversified. The style translation determines the quality of translation. If the style of the original fiction has been delivered, the translation is conceived as a good one. But here comes the question:how to deliver the style of the original fiction in translation? This is the core issue to be investigated in this study.Due to the lack of systematic theory and the fuzziness of style, the study of style translation used to meet some difficulties. In China, the scholars in the translation field have appealed to use style markers to solve the problem. Liu Miqing has come up with the Style Translation Theory, referred to as the Style Marker Theory, developed from the concept of style marker first proposed by Leech. The Style Marker Theory consists of formal markers and non-formal markers. After that, the Liu's Style Marker Theory is considered to be the theoretical framework for the translatability of the fiction style.Therefore, the present research takes Liu's Style Marker Theory as the theoretical framework, from both the formal markers and non-formal markers, to contrastively analyze The Kite Runner's two Chinese versions:one is the simplified Chinese version Zhui Feng Zheng De Ren translated by Li Jihong; the other is the traditional Chinese version Zhui Feng Zheng De Hai Zi translated by Taiwanese Li Jingyi. Though these two types of markers have generalized the elements of the style, this study puts more stress on the analysis of the formal markers, and the non-formal markers is taken as a supplemented analysis. And the two translated version would be analyzed from the aspects of phonological markers, register markers, syntactic markers, lexical markers, textual markers, rhetorical markers, ways of expression and readers' factors. After studying the examples in The Kite Runner and its two Chinese versions, the differences and similarity of the style between the two Chinese versions can be analyzed and summarized. What's more, the study validates the necessity of the Style Markers Theory in investigating the translatability of the fiction style.