| Amy Tan,a prominent writer of Chinese American literature,is well known for her masterpiece The Joy Luck Club.Despite dozens of studies devoted to its Chinese translations,few focus has been placed on style reproduction and on the comparison of Cheng Naishan's two translations.By conducting a comparative study between the two translations,this thesis aims to examine how the style of the source text is reproduced in two translations and to discover the motivation behind certain changes.With the help of a checklist of linguistic and stylistic categories by Leech and Short(2007),stylistic analysis of the source text is carried out in four categories:lexical categories,grammatical categories,figures of speech and context.Both quantitative and qualitative analysis are employed to identify stylistic features such as the simple and colloquial lexis,deviation in Chinese expressions,sentence simplicity,deviation in long sentences,ample use of figures of speech and the combination of the first-and third-person narration.A comparison between Cheng's two translations unravels that a closer style reproduction is realized in Cheng's retranslation by recreating the underlying states of minds of the characters and revealing the cognitive states embodied in the source text.Cheng omits redundant words and replaces formal and literary words with simple and colloquial ones so that lexical simplicity and colloquialism are better reproduced.The translation of Chinese expressions is adjusted so as to create the same cognitive effect as the reader of the English text for the reader of Chinese translation.In addition,the mental states embodied in sentence simplicity are better recreated.Moreover,notable changes are made as to paratextual elements so that the reader may readily grasp the stylistic feature.However,the retranslation also sees inadequacies in the translation of long sentences and figures of speech that require future improvement. |
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