The Analysis Of Two Chinese Translations Of The Prophet From The Perspective Of Literary Stylistics

"Literary stylistics" refers to the stylistic school that tends to interpret literary works' thematic and aesthetic meanings. Being the bridge between literary criticism and linguistics, it focuses on researching how the author expresses the thematic and art meanings by linguistic choices. Literary stylistics, on the basis of linguistic methodologies, studies both the content and form of literary text, thus transforming the literary research from subjectivity to objectivity and is regarded as "an essential standard to evaluate the translation qualities."Applying literary stylistics to translation studies can help translators enhance stylistic awareness and figure out the author's stylistic features, which can reduce the loss of stylistic during the translation procedure and therefore retain the original style to a larger degree. Meanwhile, the combination of literary stylistics and translation criticism may help critics explore the detective equivalence between the source text and the target text.The Prophet was regarded as Gibran's most representative work and had been translated into 56 languages since its first publication in 1923. Bingxin firstly translated it into Chinese in 1931, and was followed by nearly 30 versions. Compared with its translation popularity, however, the study on the Chinese translations of The Prophet seems to be desolate, with only 7 journal articles and 2 papers focusing on the research while only one thesis making comparative analysis between different Chinese versions. None of them has adopted the perspective of literary stylistics theory.Selecting Binxin's and Qian Mansu's versions as research objects, the paper aims to make a comparison in terms of the representation of the original style from five aspects: lexis, syntax, figures of speech, cohesion & context and tones. It is concluded that Bingxin tends to use literal translation and pursue elegance while Qian Mansu aims to achieve concision. At the end of the analysis, the thesis tries to further explore the potential causes leading to the differences between the two versions.