Translation Of Personal Pronouns In Novels

Blackberries,Blackberries is a collection of stories by an African-American feminist writer,Crystal Wilkinson,and it had won the 2002 Chaffin Award for Appalachian Literature.This book mainly describes the life of the black women in 20th century America,presenting readers with completely different experience.The translator selects six stories in these book to translate,and most of these stories are told from the perspective of the third person,while the rest are told from the first person.And the personal pronouns appear very frequently in the English text,especially the third personal pronouns.Since that English is featured by hypotaxis and Chinese by parataxis,there are some differences in the use of personal pronouns between English and Chinese texts.Generally speaking,there is a highly developed pronoun system in English.In order to achieve the sentence connection and textural cohesion,the language usually has a high use frequency of personal pronouns.However,the Chinese language always has a tendency of exclusion toward personal pronouns.Instead,the language prefers to repeat the referents or just omit them to avoid ambiguity.This thesis mainly focuses on the translation of personal pronouns in novels.The thesis first analyzes the the basic background of personal pronouns in English and Chinese respectively.Next by comparing the differences and similarities of the use of personal pronouns between English and Chinese,the thesis points out that the main problem in the English-Chinese translation of personal pronouns is how to control the frequency and the clarity of personal pronouns in the two languages.Then two general translation methods of personal pronouns are summarized in the thesis.The first is to omit some personal pronouns when the omission does not cause any misunderstanding in the target text;the second is to repeat the referents to clarify the reference relations when literal translation does not conform to the expression habit of the target language and can even cause confusion.In addition,the thesis discusses the translation of cataphoric personal pronouns.Due to the syntactic differences between Chinese and English,when translating the cataphoric personal pronouns,the word order must be changed.So translators should exchange the position of the personal pronoun and its referent.Finally,according to the skopos theory,the thesis further puts forward several translation methods of personal pronouns based on readers'reception.The first is the method of conversion,namely to convert personal pronouns flexibly according to target readers' reading mentality so as to shorten the gap between the readers and the text,and make them have resonance.Then sometimes when the plural personal pronouns are used in the source language,addition or division can be adopted to clearly present the relationships of the characters,as well as to convey the meaning and the emotion of the source text more accurately.The last is to use personal pronouns selectively,in general,adopting personal pronouns mainly to refer to the major characters and repeating the name of minor characters when there are more than one character involved in a context.