A Study On The English Translation Of To Live From The Perspective Of Narratology

The fiction,To Live,is the most influential work of the famous Chinese pioneer writer Yu Hua's,also representing the turning point of his writing style.Because of To Live,Yu Hua gained the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in March,2004.What's more,the English version translated by American scholar Michael Berry is widely accepted in Western countries,receiving Western readers' extensive attention and awareness.To Live won The Italian Premio Grinzane Cavour for The Best Foreign Fiction(1998)and The French International Courier Foreign Prize for Fiction(2008).After entering the 21 th century,with the enhancement of Chinese soft power and the intense promoting demand of Chinese culture,the number of researches on Yu Hua's To Live and its English version is increasing.In recent years,many Chinese scholars have explored the English version of To Live from different angles,such as translation variation theory approach,culture-oriented approach,adaptation theory approach,etc.However,considering that narratology is an important theory in the field of literature criticism and literature study,there is still no scholar choosing narratology as an entry point to discuss the English version of To Live.Therefore,this thesis will analyze the English version of To Live from the perspective of narratology in order to prove that the theory of narrratology is instructive to the study of literature translation.Theoretically based on narratology,this thesis conducts a qualitative research on the English version of Yu Hua's novel To Live.By analyzing the original text of To Live(2012)and the target text translated by Michael Berry,the author tries to describe the translation features and strategies in Michael Berry's translated version in narratological perspective.More specifically,by choosing three concepts,namely,narrative time,narrative viewpoint and speech presentation,from the theory of narratology,the author will according to those three concepts compare and analyze the source text and target text by relative narratological features,for the purpose ofexploring whether or not the target text narraologically accords with the source text,what the differences are there between the source text and the target text in terms of narratological effects,how and why the translator deals with those differences in the target text.The domain of this research is the exploration of narrative time,narrative viewpoint and speech presentation of the English version of To Live and it is the objective and major purpose of this thesis to use the theory of narratology to elucidate the translation products of fictions.The present research further illustrates that the theory of narratology plays a significant role in literature translation.In the light of theoretical deduction and data analysis,this thesis tentatively concludes the translation features and strategies in Michael Berry's translated version and describes the translation reproduction of the original text in terms of the narrative time,narrative viewpoint and speech presentation,in the hope of providing a new angle for the translation study of the English version of To Live and shedding some light upon the future research on fiction translation.