Functional Recontextualization And Literary Translation

This paper is a report based on the translation of the following 4 literary works: The Keeper of Lost Things,18 chapters of The High Window,9 chapters of A Sand County Almanac,and14 chapters of Specimen Days(note: the 23 chapters of the translation of A Sand County Almanac and Specimen Days are published in a prose collection Nature,the Most Beautiful of All).As the translator of these works,the writer of this report chose them as the original texts for translation,with the consideration of making the translation study more applicable,and thereby providing some insights for literary translation.The Keeper of Lost Things,a best-selling novel published in 2017 by the British author Ruth Hogan,sketches out in two settings a complex network of people and objects.The stories behind the lost things manifest the significance of the objects to people and praise the true,the good and the beautiful of people's mind.The High Window is one of the “tough detective” series of Raymond Chandler,a famous American reasoning novelist,and it tells the story of a private detective called Philip Marlowe,who is employed to investigate a rare gold coin theft.A Sand County Almanac is a collection of essays by Aldo Leopold,a famous American ecologist.It presents the author's experiences of living far away from modern life in rural farmhouses and his travel across the United States.Specimen Days is an autobiographical essay collection of the famous American poet Walt Whitman,in which the author describes his personal experience in returning to the nature,expressing his heartfelt respect and love for the nature.In the process of translation,the functional recontextualizaion theory is adopted as the guiding theory.After the translation,a tentative model for literary translation is summarized by taking into account the previous studies on functional recontextualization in translation and the experience obtained from this translation practice.The report will first give a brief introduction to the basic information of the task,the preparatory work before translation and the entire process of translation.Then,it will briefly review the development processes and applications of functional recontextualization.Based on the previous studies and the author's experience gained from the translation practice,the methods of the functional recontextualization in literary translation will be analyzed with concrete examples.In Systemic Functional Linguistics,contexts consist of two types: the cultural and thesituational.The cultural context is the sum of political,moral,technological,social and other contexts involved in the use of language.The situational context,however,includes communicative participants,their behaviors,and surroundings.The two contexts are at the two ends of an instantiation cline: the situational context is at the instance end,and the cultural context is at the potential end.The cultural context is instantiated by the situational context and is the sum of all potential or actual situational contexts.In addition,contexts can be divided into the non-linguistic and linguistic contexts(including the semantic system,etc.),accordingly,cultural contexts can be considered to include non-linguistic cultural contexts and linguistic cultural contexts,and in the same way,situational contexts can be considered to include non-linguistic situational contexts and linguistic situational contexts.(Wang Yanqing& Zhao Guiying,2011).Translation is the recontextualization of the contexts from the source language to the target language.In this process,language users choose the information in the source language and reprocess it in the context of the target language,which necessarily involves the transformation in the cultural contexts and the situational contexts of both languages.Because the cultural context and situational context are at the same level,with the former being the sum of the latter,a translation can be seen as a process of recontextualization of situational contexts and is restricted and influenced by cultural contexts.In view of this,the functional context theory and context recontextualization are combined in this paper,with the former providing the analysis levels for the latter,and the latter providing the analysis methods for the former,which can jointly guide the literary translation practice.The analysis reveals that the process of literary translation is the process of recontextualization of the non-linguistic and linguistic situational contexts of the original works,in which translators acquire the elements and information in the original contexts and screen and reorganize them in the target language contexts,so as to transmit the contents and the thoughts in the original works,or to achieve maximum reader acceptance.In the process of linguistic situational recontextualization,in situations both Chinese and English contexts have in common,methods of transformation including addition,deletion,replacement,and rearrangement(van Leeuwen & Wodak,1999)will be applied to transmit the source contents faithfully and comply to the target language's grammatical rules.And in the process of non-linguistic situational recontextualization,based on the full knowledge of the differencesbetween Chinese and English cultures,translators resort to the cultural translation strategies,i.e.foreignization and domestication,to achieve the goal of introducing foreign cultures or conforming to the target readers' knowledge,thus forming new contexts between the source contexts and the target contexts.It is hoped that this report can promote the application and study of functional recontextualization in the field of translation and provide a new theoretical perspective and practical guidance for literary translation.