A Comparative Study On Chinese Translation Of Puns In Walden

Walden is the masterpiece of American transcendentalist Thoreau.As ecological environment deteriorates,there emerges a growing pursuit for ecological balance worldwide.Literature review demonstrates that most of the studies on Walden are committed to expounding its ideological idea and though some are devoted to carrying out comparative studies on its Chinese versions,few of them focus on specific language phenomena.Walden-is characterized 'by rich vocabulary varieties,diversified syntactic structures and various rhetorical means,one of which is pun.Pun,endowed with multiple rhetorical effects,is capable of rendering language vivacious,lively and ambiguous.However,the translation of pun has always been troubling translators.Three Chinese versions of Walden by different translators in different periods are chosen for comparative study in the present thesis,in attempt to bring to light similarities and differences among the three versions and generalize the change trend of translation of puns reflected in the three versions.The three versions involved are Xu Chi's version(hereinafter referred to as Xu's version)published in 1982,Dai Huan's version(hereinafter referred to as Dai's version)published in 2003 and Pan Qingling's version(hereinafter referred to as Pan's version)published in-2007 respectively.As Walden is filled with puns,due to limited space,the present study focuses on the analysis of some typical ones.Through consulting a large quantity of literature and reading through these versions,puns involved in comparative study in this thesis are mainly divided into three categories with three subcategories for each category,namely,puns denoting logical relations including phonetic puns,semantic puns and grammatical puns,puns exerting rhetorical effects including puns exerting humorous effects,puns exerting ironic effects and puns exerting metaphoric effects,and puns deepening the theme including puns related to context,puns related to syntactic form and puns related to intertextuality.The study arrives at the following findings:Firstly,on the whole,Xu resorts to the foreignization strategy to translate puns,which centers on the source text,makes translation adapt to language codes of the source text and endeavors to retain the original flavor of the source text.Despite the fact that Xu has added explanatory notes,some of his translations of puns are still,unavoidably,obscure and difficult to understand,because of inconformity to Chinese language codes.In contrast to Xu's version,Dai's version adopts the domestication strategy,which reserves little of the original flavor of the source text,though more approachable to Chinese readers.Pan's version is also a product of the domestication strategy,but unlike Dai,Pan provides notes to explain culture-loaded puns,which enables readers to appreciate the original flavor of the source text while encountering no difficulties in reading through the translated version.Secondly,to be specific,translations of puns by the three Chinese versions also differentiate from each other in lexical,syntactic and textual terms.In the first place,Xu uses mainly formal words to translate puns.Pan prefers vocabulary loaded with rich emotional references,reduplicated words as well as four-character phrases.Dai is apt to use colloquial vocabulary.In the second place,in terms of syntactic forms,syntactic forms in Pan's translations of puns are largely Europeanized,which makes it quite unintelligible,whereas Dai and Pan's translations are rather flexible in syntactic forms.In the third place,from the textual perspective,due to the use of Europeanized syntactic forms,logical relations in Xu's version are not as clear as those in the original text and textual coherence is also out of the question.Comparatively speaking,Dai and Pan's translations of puns are rich in textual cohesive devices,flexible in syntactic forms and clear in logical relations,thus easier for readers to understand.Thirdly,with the advancement of time,translation of puns in Walden unfolds an Increasing trend towards domestication.