A Comparative Study Of The Mind Styles Reproduced In Four English Versions Of A Madman's Diary

Lu Xun is one of the most influential writers in the twentieth century,whose bitter realism reveals the suffering of the masses and the social illness of late-imperial China.Lu Xun's first vernacular fiction,A Madman's Diary,opened a new chapter in Chinese modern literature.In A Madman's Diary,Lu Xun makes a howl to awake the numb public via the seemingly crazy speech of a madman.The madman's narrative is characterized by unorthodox use of language which reflects his peculiar way of perceiving the world,a nd launches a forceful attack against the language norm,as well as the feudalistic ideology.The English translations of A Madman's Diary have been examined from various aspects and perspectives by Chinese scholars.Some scholars are particularly concerned with the reproduction of style in the English translations of A Madman's Diary.However,little attention has been given to the mind styles projected in A Madman's Diary.Mind style is an important aspect of style;it refers to the personal conceptualization of the world reflected via the formal structure of language.The linguistic choices in terms of semantics and syntax indicate how the world is perceived in a particular mind.The present study probes into the translation of mind style in four English versions of A Madman's Diary,translated respectively by Lovell,Lyell,Wang and the Yangs.Based on Leech and Short's discussion of literary stylistics,comparative analyses of A Madman's Diary and its four versions are conducted from the following aspects: lexis,syntax and textual relations.At the lexical level,mind style is examined in relation to register,choice of adjectives,nominalization and figure of speech.At the syntactical level,mind style indicators such as sentence type,sentence structure,participant relations,transitivity and verb tense are observed.With regards to textual relations,cross reference and linkage are discussed.This thesis finds that the mind style of the madman reproduced by Lovell and Lyell is more discernible as peculiar,whereas in Wang's and the Yangs' versions,the madman's mind style seems less unusual.Lovell makes deviant linguistic choices in terms of lexis,syntax and textual relations.Lyell's version is featured by some deviant linguistic choices mainly at the lexical and the syntactical level.As a result,the mind styles recreated by Lovell and Lyell are more aligned with the eccentric mind style projected in the original work.Relatively speaking,less foregrounded language use are found in Wang's and the Yangs' versions.Therefore,the madman's unusual mind style in A Madman's Diary has been normalized in Wang's and the Yangs' versions to some degree.