A Comparative Study Of The Two English Versions Of Biancheng From The Perspective Of Liliteray Stylistics

The significance of fiction lies in both the content and the form.The form usually reinforces or modifies thematic or artistic meanings.However,in traditional fictional translation,translators often pay more attention to the fictional facts while overlooking the linguistic forms and the stylistic effects.What is more,studies or criticism of literary translation,especially the fictional translation,have remained traditional and mainly are commented by subjective,impressionistic methods or an intuitive analysis.Literary stylistics as a discipline mediating between literary criticism and linguistics,focus on how the writer's verbal choices contribute to the thematic and artistic significance of literary works.By use of linguistic models in interpretation of the literary texts,it directs literary studies from subjectivity to objectivity.Applying it to studies of style in English translations contributes to translators' stylistic competence or sensibility to different linguistic choices and helps them evaluate whether they reappear the stylistic values or not in translating.So,literary stylistics is chosen as the perspective by this thesis to make a comparative study of two English versions of Biancheng.As Shen Congwen's magnum opus,Biancheng is considered as the best work of its kind in modern Chinese literature.According to the review of the previous studies,its four English versions receive much less attention compared with tremendous researches on this novel itself.Among the four versions,two ones are more popular with readers and the majority of studies focus on them.One is The Border Town translated by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang,and the other is Border Town by Jeffrey C.Kinkley.However,the studies of its English versions are limited to functional equivalence,translation aesthetic,descriptive approach,cultural-loaded wordstranslation,foreignization and domestication,skopos theory,and intertextuality.Moreover,there lack systematic analysis and evaluation on its English versions from literary stylistics.Therefore,this thesis will try to examine whether the stylistic features and effects of the original are retained or not in the two English versions by a detailed analysis of them.This thesis has five chapters.Research background,significance and research methods of this thesis are introduced in the first chapter,as well as its structure.The second chapter is a review of studies from the perspective of literary stylistics and also studies of English versions of Biancheng,then expounds the value of making a comparative study between Yang's and Kinkley's version.The third chapter introduces a method of analysis raised by Leech and Short in literary stylistics,and also some important terms.Chapter four makes a comparative study from lexical level,grammatical level,figure of speech and cohesion to analyze the stylistic feature of the two versions and the translators' choice in representing the style of the original text.Chapter five concludes the whole study,its achievements and limitations.