A Study Of Irony In Howard Goldblatt's Translation Of Hulanhe Zhuan From The Perspective Of Literary Stylistics

Howard Goldblatt,a world-renowned translator,has played a significant role in the course of promoting Chinese literature to the world.The academic circle has always attached great importance to the study of his translation,while neglecting the translation works and translation thoughts at his early stage.As the most important representative work of Xiao Hong in later period,Hulanhe Zhuan has gained a deep appreciation from Goldblatt and opened the door for his way of translating Chinese literature.It is acknowledged that Hulanhe Zhuan boasts its profound thematic unity and unique aesthetic effect,which are closely related to the forms of irony that frequently appear in the work.Irony,as a common linguistic phenomenon in literary works,can effectively express the thematic unity and aesthetic effect of the work.However,rooted in a specific cultural background,the complexity of irony has been determined,thus the translation of irony has always been a thorny issue.This thesis is an attempt to study irony translation from the perspective of literary stylistics and explore the applicability of literary stylistics into irony translation.Literary stylistics not only pays attention to the accuracy and systematization of linguistic description,but also takes the ideological content and aesthetic effect of the work into account.In a word,it aims at discussing how to produce and strengthen the thematic unity and aesthetic effect through the specific choice of language.This thesis mainly takes literary stylistics as the theoretical framework in order to explore how the translator reproduces the effect of irony.Through a comparative study between the original and the translated version,the effect of irony is analyzed from the following four categories: lexical,grammar,figures of speech,and cohesion and context.Finally,the translation strategies of reproducing irony are summarized so as to provide reference for the irony translation in other literary texts in the future.To sum up,the findings of this thesis are as follows.Firstly,the multiple irony forms in the original are not disorderly distributed,but orderly constructed from the whole to the part and from the macro to the microcosmic,thus ultimately forming a holistic irony system instead of scattered irony fragments.Secondly,the overall construction of the multiple irony forms has contributed a lot in presenting the aesthetic effect and thematic unity of the original work,which well explains the necessity for the translator to reproduce the multiple forms of irony in the translation of Hulanhe Zhuan.Thirdly,the translator has reproduced the effect of irony to the most extent both in verbal and situational irony.In order to fully achieve the goal of irony effect,the translator has adopted various methods in the following four aspects,lexical,grammatical,figures of speech,and cohesion and context.