Narrative Focalizations And Speech Presentation Modes In Fiction Translation:

On the translation of narrative focalizations and speech presentation modes,present studies mainly focus on strategies for translating the Chinese fiction into English version.Strategies of the translator are concluded by comparing ST and TT.By comparison,there are fewer studies on strategies for translating narrative focalizations and speech presentation modes of English fiction.In terms of translating South African literary works,few references can be found.The selected material features varied narrative focalizations and many speech presentation modes,which provides abundant linguistic data for researching into the two questions.The prize-winning story started in a remote village where black and white people met under the umbrella tree in an afternoon several months after the June 16 Soweto Uprising.The fiction was mainly written from two points of view:a compassionate white woman whose son was missing after the unrest and a hot-blooded young black student Joseph who was hiding from the police,reflecting different attitudes toward this event and their resistance to apartheid.Translating the fiction will acquaint Chinese readers with this little-known history of South Africa.Six chapters of the novel have been selected as translation materials.This report focuses on two research issues:narrative focalizations and speech presentation modes in translating English fiction.Theories about narrative focalization and speech presentation mode,have given guidance on translating fiction.Narratologist Genette listed out three focalizations in Narrative Discourse:zero focalization,internal focalization,and external focalization.Leech and Short divided speech presentation modes into five categories:direct and indirect speech,free direct speech,the narrative report of speech acts and free indirect speech.Shen Dan has conducted comparative research on English and Chinese fiction from the perspectives of narratology and the stylistics of fiction.Fang Kairui has elaborated on strategies for reproducing the figural point of view in fictional translation.These theories constitute the main theoretical framework of this report.Based on the translation practice,this report investigates the strategies for translating narrative focalizations and speech presentation modes.The translator should attach importance to narrative focalizations and the shift of them,three strategies are summarized as follows:(1)focusing on the narrative situation and the character’s vision;(2)spotting linguistic and stylistic forms;(3)differentiating narrator’s language from the figural point of view.In dealing with speech presentation modes,three strategies are concluded:(1)preserving original modes;(2)identifying features of direct speech;(3)translating free direct speech into direct speech.