A Study On English Translation Of Dialogue In Yu Hua's Huozhe

As an important literary genre,the novel keeps the readers engaged with vivid character images portrayed through dialogue.As it is,dialogue is a prominent feature of Yu Hua's critically acclaimed novel Huozhe.Its English version entitled To Live: A Novel was published in 2003 by Anchor Books of Random House in American sinologist Michael Berry's translation.In this novel,the description of conversations has positive effects on characterization,and dialogue contains abundant interpersonal meaning.As an important concept of Systemic Functional Linguistics,interpersonal meaning reveals role relationships in communicative interaction.Speakers express their attitude,status,motivation,and behaviors through dialogue.As far as translation is concerned,the representation of character images mainly depends on the representation of interpersonal meaning in dialogues.This thesis aims to examine how Michael Berry handles the dialogue in Yu Hua's novel with the concept of interpersonal meaning as analytical tool.It will analyze his representation of interpersonal meaning in the novel's dialogue through quantitative and qualitative analysis in hopes that this case study can provide some reference for the translation of Chinese fictional dialogue.This thesis comprises five chapters in addition to an Introduction,a Conclusion and Appendices.The Introduction states the research background,significance,questions,methodology and thesis structure.Chapter One reviews major literature on the novel itself and its English version,which finds that for the present few studies are concerned with English translation of dialogue in the novel.Chapter Two summarizes the theoretical framework adopted in the thesis,i.e.interpersonal meaning in Systemic Functional Linguistics and its related concepts.Chapter Three discusses the similarities and differences of linguistic devices in mood and modality systems between Chinese and English.It is pointed out that such knowledge can guide both dialogue translation practice and research.Chapter Four makes a statistical analysis of dialogues in the novel and its English version to examine the degree of representation of interpersonal meaning.The present author manually collects all the dialogues in the original text featuring linguistic devices of mood system and modality system under the internal narrative of dialogues.The statistical results show that the translator alters the lexical and grammatical devices to some extent,but on the whole he tends to preserve these linguistic devices in the translation to keep the original taste of the novel with its particular social background,vivid plot and distinctive character images.Chapter Five analyzes the translation of dialogues in To Live in terms of mood system and modality system with reference to carefully selected examples.Judging by the translator's preservation or alteration of linguistic devices and interpersonal meaning in the original dialogue,it attempts to find out if the translation is source-oriented or target-oriented,the binary terms proposed by Theo Hermans as basic translation strategies.It is found that on the whole the translator tends to represent interpersonal meaning implicated in the original dialogue by retaining the original linguistic devices in the English version.Hence,his overall translation strategy is found to be source-oriented.On the other hand,there are also certain cases where the original linguistic devices are altered,and that fails to convey the interpersonal meaning faithfully to the target readers.The Conclusion summarizes the main findings and conclusions,points out its limitations and provides suggestions for further studies on the topic.The author suggests that a source-oriented approach to dialogue translation can help represent the original interpersonal meaning faithfully and thus highlight the literariness of Chinese novels,but that should be striven for only when its readability is guaranteed.