Stylistic Analysis Of Non-literary Texts And Stylistic Reproduction Strategies In Their Translation

The vivid language and the novel way of story-telling make the book A History of Religion in 5 1/2 objects:Bringing the Spiritual to Its Senses stand out among a sea of religious writings.In the chapter "Stones",the style of the text can be seen and felt in the frequent use of rhetoric devices like simile and metaphor,the creative expressions across the text,and the long and parallel sentence structure.Language style is an essential contributor to an excellent text,thus maintaining the original language style is one of my key goals during translation.In the book Style in Fiction:A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose,Leech and Short provide a method of style analysis,which offers guidance to the study of the language style of fictional texts.According to Leech and Short,the method focuses on four kinds of linguistic features,and helps recognize language styles from different dimensions.Stylistic marker theory proposed by Professor Liu Miqing talks about two types of markers(form markers and non-formal markers)in the recognition of language style,and evaluates gains and losses during transmission.Compared to pure linguistic views,stylistic marker theory analyses language styles from both micro and macro aspects.Therefore,the theory can be used to recognize language styles in an objective way,and can guide translation practice at different levels of a text.Until now,most researches in this field seek to use the two theories to guide the study of language styles and the English-Chinese translation of literary works.However,the two theories are seldom applied to non-literary texts.Taking the chapter "Stones" of the book A History of Religion in 5 1/2 Objects as an example,this paper will first analyse the overall style of the source text under the four categories proposed by Leech and Short,and then discuss the translation strategies used for the details that build up the style—the form markers proposed by Liu Miqing.In this way.this paper seeks to examine whether the stylistic analysis theories can be used to instruct the analysis and translation of non-literary texts.