The Construction Of Textuality In Translation

Textuality is the fundamental property of texts,distinguishing texts and non-texts.A text is defined as a semantic unit produced in its context and used as the communicative unit by its members.Thus one text could be defined as a communicative unit closely related with its context only if it has a high degree of textuality.As a cross-culture and cross-language communication,the degree of textuality in the translated works should also be concerned and studied by researchers.Whether translation is successful or not depends much on textuality.Therefore,textuality could be regarded as one of the most important standards of translation.Whether the textuality of the source text is constructed or not can be applied in evaluating the faithfulness of the translated text.It will provide specific suggestions for translation practice and references for translation quality assessment.Textuality has been studied from many perspectives by textual linguists.Beaugrand and Dressler put forward the seven standards of textuality with findings from other disciplines.Systematic functional grammar provides us with the meaning potential which contributes to the construction of textuality.Textual function includes three textual-forming resources involving thematic structure,information structure and cohesion devices.Therefore,under the guidance of standards of textuality,the construction of textuality in translation will be studied through the three textual forming resources.Lu Xun is one of the leading figures of modern Chinese literature.His works not only exert great influence on Chinese literature but also on world literature.His works have been translated into several languages.Studies about the translation of his works have been conducted from different perspectives at home.However,it is the construction of textuality that is seldomly discussed.Otherwise,studies of his single work are usually focused on A-Q Zheng Zhuan and Kuang Ren Ri Ji whereas the translation of Gu Du Zhe,the other representative work of Lu Xun has not been focused on.Hereby,the source text of Gu Du Zhe and its English versions will be compared and evaluated from the perspective of textuality construction,which could make contributions to translation practice and translation quality assessment.With methods of close-reading,description and explanation,comparison and quantity-analysis,language resources of textual function are analyzed at length in the three chapters.The process and results of the study will be illuminated on the basis of close-reading,the comparison between the source text and the translated text and the contrast between the two translated texts.In this study,the construction of textuality in the source text is investigated from three aspects including thematic structure,information structure and cohesion relations.Then,the textuality of the two English versions are studied and compared from the three aspects as well.Lastly,based on the analysis and the comparison,translation methods are proposed.The conclusions are given as the following.In the source text,the standards of textuality including cohesion and coherence,intentionality,acceptability,informativity and situationality are all fulfilled by the three textual-forming resources.Same as the source text,textuality is constructed in the translated texts.Nevertheless,there are also discrepancies between the two English versions.In Yang Xianyi's translation,it could find that the intention of the author and narrator are paid more attention.Thus the intentionality in his translation is higher than Julia Lovell's translation while Julia Lovell's translation is higher in informativity.Upon the comparison,the translation methods can be concluded.To construct the coherence and intentionaliy in the target text,the selection of the theme and thematic pattern of the source text should be reserved.For the given information implied in the cultural context,the method of translating its connotation should be applied in order to reduce the unpredictable information and improve the readability.As to the information implied in the situational context,translator should translate it according to the acceptability.The information focus of the translated text should be same as the source text in order to satisfy informativity and acceptability in translation.In addition,reserving the information flow pattern of the source text is the method to achieve coherence and acceptability.Otherwise,translator can also construct textuality upon the reference chain and conjunction chain of the source text and the standards which it fulfills.At last,to construct cohesion and coherence in translation,the lexical chain in the source text should be represented in target language in the translated text.