| The success of Lu Xun's short story Gaolaofuzi is largely attributed to the psychological portrayal of the protagonist Gao Erchu,through which the image of morally corrupt Confucian followers is delicately crafted.The psychological portrayal,which accounts for a large proportion of the whole story,takes the form of free indirect discourse(FID).FID is featured by the omitted reporting clause,the third-person pronoun,and past tense,in which the narrator slips inconspicuously from narrative statement to interior portrayal,and consequently the voice of the narrator and that of the character fuse into a bivocal utterance.It performs the function of conveying irony,conveying empathy as well as contributing to the semantic density of the text.FID in Gaolaofuzi is mainly concerned with the function of conveying irony.It is found that no critical attention has been paid to the English translation of FID,and that no studies have been devoted to the English translation of Gaolaofuzi,the story which is imbued with rich examples of FID.The research seeks to address the issue by conducting a comparative study on the English translations of FID in Lu Xun's short story Gaolaofuzi contributed by Wang(1941),the Yang's(1960),Lyell(1990)and Lovell(2009),in an attempt to examine the translation preferences of different translators,the artistic and thematic effects produced by such preferences,as well as possible causes for these preferences.Employing descriptive translation studies(DTS),the research describes and explains the characteristics concerning FID in the source text as well as the target texts.“Expressive element”,which is largely responsible for the expressivity of FID,is introduced to evaluate FID in Gaolaofuzi and in the four translated texts.For the categorization of expressive elements,we adopt Fludernik's(1993)list and according towhich the comparative study on English translations of FID in Gaolaofuzi falls into four categories: adverbial deixis,pragmatic category of expressivity,syntactic expressions of subjectivity,and lexical indications of subjectivity.The findings suggest that Lyell and Lovell have a salient preference for expressive elements by and large,exercising a rigid control over the texts where the character's psychological activities are prolonged,enriched and intensified,thereby amplifying both the inner voice of the character and the mocking tone of the narrator;whereas Wang and the Yang's show an opposite tendency and merely adopt a small amount of expressive elements,objectifying the character's interior portrayal through the employment of a calm narrator to tone down the voice of the character and of a neat,well-balanced complex sentence structure to speed up the narrative pace,thus transforming the dual voice into a single voice.Another prominent trait is that Lyell's rendition is featured by the juxtaposition of abundant expressive elements at one hand and of in-text citations at the other,which is considerably paradoxical as the reader successfully slips into the character's consciousness by the presence of expressive elements but meanwhile s/he is interrupted and informed by in-text citations that the authentic feeling generated at the very moment is faked.Possible reasons for the aforementioned discoveries are also attempted in this research. |
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