Translation Of Defamiliarization In The English Version Of Shou Huo

Russian Formalists hold that literature is defined by literariness and literariness is realized by defamiliarization.Defamiliarization is to challenge habituation and automation and to prolong the process of perception to bring newness and strangeness.To correctly understand and properly reproduce defamiliarization in the source text is the key to reconstructing literariness in translated literature.Yan Lianke is one of the best contemporary Chinese writers of magical realism.His works boast defamiliarization,jolting readers out of habituation by bold imagination,strong local flavor and absurd stories told in a language that is both vulgar and flowery,but also posing great difficulty to translators.Written in Henan dialect,Shou Huo tells an absurd story about how marginalized rural areas are dragged into modernization.Lenin's Kisses,the English version of the novel,is a big success in the West and hence an epitome of translated literature whose literariness is achieved through reproduction of defamiliarization.Inspired by the theory of defamiliarization,the thesis analyzes defamiliarization in Lenin's Kisses at linguistic,rhetoric and cultural level.By descriptive and qualitative analysis,the author finds out that foreignization strategy,including transliteration,literal translation,and coinage etc.is adopted.Foreignization preserves as much as possible the traits of the source language,the imagery and the richness of the source culture.At rhetoric level,the translator tries to keep in line with original novel and resorts to new rhetoric devices,including variation of registers and puns,if the original ones fail to reproduce defamiliarization in the target text.In balancing defamiliarization and readers' understanding,explanatory information is added and greater coherence is achieved by reorganizing fictional events by temporal sequence and meaning relevance.Lenin's Kisses successfully reconstructed literariness by translation of defamiliarization and balanced defamiliarization and readers' acceptability.