A Study Of Translating "second Person Narration" In Yumi—From The Perspective Of Literary Stylistics

While Chinese literature is going global,a lot of efforts are being made to introduce the works of Chinese authors to the world.People begin to realize that the spread and acceptance of Chinese literature in the West depends much on translation.Therefore,the author would like to carry out a comparative study on Yumi,a Chinese novel written by Bi Feiyu,and its English version Three Sisters translated by Howard Goldblatt and his wife Sylvia Li-chun Lin,hopefully to make a humble contribution to Chinese literature “going global”.One of the most marked features of Bi Feiyu's Yumi is the use of “second person narration”.Actually,this novel Yumi is a third person narrated story,and “second person narration” is a special narrative technique employed by Bi Feiyu,which boasts different modes of speech and thought presentation.“It determines the tone,the distance,the degree of author's intervention,the implied judgments,the emotion and the point of view.Without this special narrative technique,this novel wouldn't have achieved such a success,” Bi Feiyu(2003)comments.However,research on “second person narration” and its translation is rare.According to literary stylistics,all kinds of literary works,including fiction,are the integration of content and form.Translating content but ignoring the literary significance of stylistic features leads to “deceptive equivalence”.In this thesis,the author takes a descriptive approach and applies literary stylistics to the analysis of original and translated texts,to enhance the awareness of “second person narration”,to appreciate its stylistic features,and to obtain a better understanding of its thematic significance and aesthetic function.The in-depth analysis is carried out at phonological,graphological,lexical and grammatical levels to see if the translation captures the stylistic features of the original,delivers the same literary functions as the original and achieves functional equivalence.In the end,there is a summary of translation methods that translators should adopt to achieve functional equivalence.After thorough stylistic analysis,there come the following conclusions: a)“second person narration” of Bi Feiyu takes four different narrative forms of speech and thought presentation,including free direct speech,free direct thought,blend,and slipping.The stylistic features of “second person narration” include modal particles at the phonological level;question mark and exclamation mark at the graphological level;colloquial words,value-laden adjective at the lexical level;and reporting clause and tense at the grammatical level.Through changing modes of speech/thought presentation,the narrator forsakes his invisibility and enters the character's inner world.The transition from narrator to character also shortens the distance between the narrator and the reader and reveals subjective judgments,thus conveying irony and empathy,the major literary function of “second person narration”.b)In the translation of “second person narration”,the translators faithfully deliver “second person narration” and sometimes employ dash and italics to mark it to achieve functional equivalence,but there are also cases of “deceptive equivalence”.For example,free direct speech is simply treated as third person objective statements,leading to the loss of literary significance.c)A faithful delivery of “second person narration” is recommended.FDS/FDT should be kept for vividness and immediacy;Blend should be rendered into free indirect mode,for it can offer novelists the opportunity to combine some of the separate advantages of both the direct and the indirect form;and Slipping should be kept as much as possible for a plurality of voices.Besides,stylistic features at all four levels should be subtly used to foreground “second person narration” and achieve functional equivalence.Hopefully,this study could inspire the translation of the author's narrative intention and devices.