A Study Of The English Translation Of Right Bank Of The Argun From The Perspective Of Narratology

Right Bank of the Argun is a prize-winning novel written by Chi Zijian.Through the first-person poetic retrospective narration the writer retells the stories of an Evenki clan almost one hundred years old.The ingenious shifts in internal focalization and external focalization enable its narrator to travel between the past and the present,tracing her long impressive memory.The striking contrasts resulting from such shifts highlight the indelible parts of the narrator's memory and help construct the theme of the novel.Besides,the mode of speech presentation is another worth-noting narrative technique used in this novel.In the light of her own emotional orientation and preference,the narrator applies various modes of speech presentation to adjust the distance between the reader and the character so as to channel the former's sympathetic identification towards the latter.Genette argues that focalization and speech presentation are two narrative techniques regulating information.The narrator can equip the reader with more or few details,in a more or less direct way.Thus,the reader is kept at a smaller or greater distance from the story the narrator tells.(Genette,1980).In this thesis,the author analyzes how the narrative art concerning focalization and speech presentation is transferred in the English version of Right Bank of the Argun.Through a comparative study of the source text and the target text,the author examines whether those two narrative techniques mentioned above manage to exert their due influence on the thematic construction and the adjustment of narrative distance in the English translation.The thesis finds that(1)the translator in some cases mistakes the narrator's narration as the character's speech,thus causing confusion about the true sentiments that attributed to the character;(2)the translator sometimes changes or omits the temporal expressions signaling external or internal focalization,thus making the contrastive effect in the target text weaker as in the source text;(3)the translator changes most of indirect speeches into direct speeches in order to cater to the reading habits of foreign readers,causing the loss of the artistic effect in the original.Thus,the author points out that the translator should pay due attention to the context and the linguistic characteristics signifying the shifts in focalizations and use corresponding tense and aspect to reproduce the mode of focalization.As well,the translator should understand the effects produced by various modes of speech presentation and the narrator's emotional orientation and preferences to accurately represent the characters' speeches.The research is of significance to fiction translation in that it points out the difficulty in reproducing the internal and external focalization and the mode of speech presentation and puts forward some useful suggestions.Also,it explores the importance of narratology to translation studies.