A Contrastive Study Of The Stylistic Features Between The Original Text And The Translated Version Of The Fall Of The House Of Usher

Stylistics is widely employed in present literary translation criticism,that is,to contrast the stylistic features between the original literary work and its translation version,for the purpose of appreciating and criticizing the translation work.The dimensions to be analyzed in stylistics include stylistic features in lexis,syntax,rhetoric and discourse.Based on the stylistics theory of Leech and Short(2001),this thesis adopts the methods of literature research,descriptive analysis and corpus analysis to compare the linguistic marks of stylistic features in lexis,syntax,rhetoric and discourse between The Fall of the House of Usher by Allan Poe and its Chinese translation by Zhu Zhenwu(2010),to explore the existence or not of stylistic deviation and deceptive equivalence.The lexical analysis covers the use of static words,semantic hue,lexical register and capitalization;the syntactic analysis will be conducted in discontinuous sentence,periodic sentence,fragmentary sentence and parallelism;the rhetoric analysis includes such rhetorical devices as rhythm,symbolism,pleonasm,oxymoron,personalization and exaggeration;cohesion and narrative perspective are analyzed for discourse dimension.It's found that,in terms of lexical stylistics,the translation reproduces the semantic color of the original,but the percentage of static word is substantially decreased in the translation while lexical register of formalness and eccentricity and capitalization are mostly removed by the translator;in terms of syntactic stylistics,except the periodic sentence which is reproduced in the target text,discontinuous sentence,fragmentary sentence and parallelism are seldom represented in the translation resulting to big stylistic deviation;in terms of rhetoric stylistics,the target text is equivalent to the source text in symbolism,personalization,pleonasm and exaggeration,while rhyme is totally damaged in the translation;the cohesion and narrative perspective in discourse level are basically reproduced in the target text for their semantic adhesiveness;the stylistic features represented by register are also reproduced in the target language.According to stylistic theory,this thesis conducted a comprehensive stylistic contrast between the original and the translation of The Fall of The House of Usher.The application of lexical register and discontinuous sentence in stylistic analysis is creative,expanding the research content of translation criticism.The contrastiveanalysis of the English original and the Chinese translation enriches our understanding towards the theme of The Fall of the House of Usher and our insight into the horror aesthetics of Allan Poe.