A Study On Style Translation Of Chen Ai Luo Ding From The Perspective Of Literary Stylistics

Chen Ai Luo Ding by A Lai,a Tibetan writer,was published in 1998 and was awarded the fifth Mao Dun Literature Award in 2000 and was translated into English by Howard Goldblatt and his wife Sylvia Li-Chun Lin in 2002.Its“special theme,special perspective,special charm out of special language”(徐其超、毛克强、邓经武,2005:321)is an important factor for its success,which creates special artistic style.The novel shows distinctive literary value and its translation draws great attention in the academic world.The aim of the thesis is to investigate whether the style of Chen Ai Luo Ding is reproduced in translation;to identify in what aspect the translators reproduce the original style and in what aspect they fail to render it with possible reasons.Both their successful handling and insufficient dealing with the original style will give some enlightenment to succeeding translators.The thesis meets with these aims by applying qualitative method and contrastive analysis.First,the writer did a careful reading of the novel and its translation,getting an overview of their respective style.Secondly,some deviant diction are identified,collected and classified.Thirdly,based on these collected data,the writer analyzes the style of Chen Ai Luo Ding on four levels: phonological level,lexical level,syntactic level and rhetorical level.Fourthly,the corresponding translations to the collected data are analyzed to identify in what aspect the original style is reproduced and in what aspect it is failed to render.Finally,the writer presents a comparatively objective evaluation of the translation in terms of the style rendering and gives suggestions for scholars interested in this field.The main conclusions drawn from this research are that the translators to a large extent reproduce the original style mainly by adopting literal translation.The translators reproduce the original’s smooth,slow and soft rhythm;to a large extent render the original’s philosophical feature and illogicality respectively realized by applying repeated words and paradoxical expressions;present dynamic pace and casual sentences manifested in the original;try their best to make such rhetorical devices as simile,metaphor and contrast reproduced in the translation.However,because of the radical differences between Chinese and English,and translators’ less sensitivity to some stylistic features,as well as translators’ high consideration of target readers’ reading preferences,such features as musicality,sense of poetry,redundancy,some prominent information,the richness of resemblance indicators and emphasis on certain information realized by contrast and metaphor are not well rendered in the translation.These features are accounted in details and it seems that the translators show too much failure in the translation,but it is not the truth.In fact,some insufficiences are uncommon in the translation,which are exemplified to arouse succeeding translators’ attention and sensitivity to such features in their translation practice.