Reproduction Of Narrative Perspective And Narrative Voice In Chinese Translations Of The Great Gatsby

Before the 20th century,fiction was considered as a mirror that reflects life,which means the styles and techniques of writing were neglected.At the end of the 20th century,the top 100 novels in American literature history were selected by the Random House,among which,The Great Gatsby by Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald ranked second.Thomas Stearms Eliot once commented that The Great Gatsby "was the first step forward of American literature after Henry James".After finishing The Great Gatsby,Fitzgerald himself also thought that The Great Gatsby "was an attempt in writing in a new style",which means the unique narrative perspectives and means of organizing character's utterances adopted in the novel.The author intends to do comparative research on three Chinese translations of The Great Gatsby from narrative perspective by conducting research methods of text analysis and comparative study.By doing this,the author aims to find out,from narrative perspective,how and why different translators ultimately produced translations with different narrative styles.Specifically,the author tries to figure out(1)how to use narrative perspective and narrative voice to analyze features of original novels and different translations,(2)how translators reproduced narrative perspective and narrative voice in their translations,and(3)how these strategies can be applied to the translation of other narrative works.Finally,the following conclusions are drawn:generally speaking,in the aspect of narrative perspective and narrative voice,Wu and Li tend to be better at choosing appropriate sentence patterns according to the situations that characters' were in,thus making narrative perspectives in their translations more like those in the original novel;as for adopting vocabularies that reflect features of narrative voice of the original,Li might as well pay a little more attention to characters' characteristics like professions and personalities;Dong had a very good understanding of narrative scenes that characters were in,and accurately rendered time and location characters were in,thus reproduced effectively narrators' narrative perspective and narrative voice.In addition,for translators,first,they need to pay attention to narrators of stories and whose perspectives the stories are told because narrators and perspectives are significant to novels' styles and forms;second,translators need to summarize strategies that novelists adopted to reveal specific characters' perspectives.After that translators need to figure out how to reproduce items in source texts that are closely related to narrative perspectives like tenses,voices,pronouns,sequences of objects that appear in stories;finally,translators need to be aware of the relation between narrative perspective and narrative voice.For instance,characters' profession,personalities,social class and certain situations they are in determine the vocabulary features and sentence patterns.As a result,translators should understand precisely narrative features of novels that they are going to translate by grasping knowledge of narrative perspective,or knowledge of narratology to avoid "deceptive equivalence"in their translations.