On The English Translation Of The Foregrounding Language In Yan Lianke’s Novel Shou Huo

Shou Huo is one of the representative works of the famous contemporary writer and litterateur Yan Lianke.Shou Huo was awarded “The Third Lao She Literature Award” and was nominated for “The International Booker Literature Award”.It has also been rated as “Best Book of the Year 2012” by The New Yorker,and it has had a wide reputation at home and abroad.Yan Lianke applies a large number of foregrounding languages in his works,which embodies his strong local writing characteristics and unique style,and foregrounding languages are well written in Shou Huo.Foregrounding theory is often used to study the style of literary works.To some extent,the quality of foregrounding language translation will affect the target readers’ understanding and perception of the original cultural image and characteristics.Based on the theory of “qualitative foregrounding” and “quantitative foregrounding” put forward by Leech and Short,and combined with the translation of foregrounding language in Yan Liank’s novel Shou Huo whose English version is translated by Carlos Rojas(Luo Peng is his Chinese name)who is an American Sinologist and translator,this thesis attempts to analyze how the translator reconstructs and reproduces the foregrounding features of the source text and retains the artistic features of the source text.This thesis also tries to summarize the translation methods adopted by Carlos Rojas in translating the foregrounding language of Shou Huo,so as to gain a deeper understanding of the art of language innovation of Yan Lianke’s works,and provide some references for studies on Yan Lianke’s literary translation and literary translation criticism.It is found in this thesis that the most outstanding foregrounding language forms in Shou Huo are lexical deviation,dialectal deviation,semantic deviation,phonological deviation,repetition and parallel structure.Under the guidance of foregrounding theory,Rojas reproduces most of the foregrounding linguistic features of the original work and adopts different translation methods in translating the foregrounding language of the source text into English text.For the translation of five types of deviation,Rojas mainly applies the translation method of coinage,word-for-word translation,paraphrase and idiomatic translation,transliteration and omission;for the translation of repetition and parallel structures,Rojas mostly adopts the translation method of word-for-word translation plus omission.Due to the differences between English and Chinese languages and cultures,the translator has made some adjustments in some situations,such as adjusting paragraphs and narrative order,in order to better achieve the coherence of the text and make it more in line with the expressive habits of English,sometimes even abandoning the translation of foregrounding effect of the source text to deliver the basic information.