A Study On The C-E Translation Of Children's Linguistic Features In Bronze And Sunflower

Children's literary work Bronze and Sunflower is one of representative works of Cao Wenxuan's pure and beautiful novel series.The whole work is beautiful and simple in language,sincere in emotion,aesthetic in artistic conception,and full of naivety,which meets the aesthetic requirements of children and is suitable for children readers.It was translated into English by Helen Wang,a British sinologist,and published in Britain in 2015.Its translation won the “Marsh Award for Children's Literature in Translation” in 2017.At present,studies on the English translation of Bronze and Sunflower are mainly carried out from the perspectives of dialogue theory,the theory of norm,communication theory,ethics,medio-translatology and eco-translatology.Though there are many perspectives involved,research results are not that fruitful.In particular,only a few researchers conduct their studies on the C-E translation of children's language features in Bronze and Sunflower from the angle of aesthetic representation,and not thorough and comprehensive enough.Based on translation aesthetics and combined with relevant theories of children's linguistics and children's psychology,this thesis tries to explore the C-E translation of children's linguistic features in Bronze and Sunflower.According to translation aesthetic theory,aesthetic subject(translator)should master basic skills of language aesthetics,study how to aesthetically evaluate the aesthetic object(original text and translated text)from levels of phonetics,lexis,syntax and rhetoric,ensure effective communications between two languages,and try to convey or reproduce the original taste of source text.Therefore,the translation of children's language features should fully consider the particularity of children readers and their language,then adopt appropriate translation methods to ensure that the beauty of original works is effectively conveyed or reproduced in translation.Children's psychology holds that the development of children's thoughts should undergo a transition from concrete image thinking to abstract logic thinking.This transition is also reflected in children's language,which is mainly manifested in children's preference for rhythmical,vivid,concise and interesting language.Language features in Bronze and Sunflower also conform to this kind of thinking habits of children,thus owning characteristics of musicality,conciseness,naivety and vividness.In the source text,the musicality of children's language is mainly manifested in the employment of rhyming and onomatopoeia.The translator dealt with rhyming by means of adaptation and onomatopoeia through literal translation method,thus reproducing the musicality of children's language at the phonetic level.Children's linguistic feature of conciseness is embodied in the extensive use of colloquial expressions and four-character phrases.The translator translated those colloquial expressions and four-character phrases by adopting translation methods of conversion and omission respectively,hence reproducing conciseness of children's language at the lexical level.The naivety of children's language is mainly reflected in the use of simple sentences,structures and interesting contents.The translator translated those simple sentences and textual structures by the translation method of inversion,thus reproducing naivety of children's language at the syntactical level.The vividness is displayed in the extensive use of rhetoric devices such as simile,hyperbole and parallelism.The translator translated simile,hyperbole and parallelism by means of combination,literal translation and omission methods accordingly,reproducing the vividness of children's language at the rhetorical level.In the process of translating children's literary works,the key is how to deal with children's linguistic features.The employment of these translation methods can not only effectively represent children's linguistic features in the source text to the translated text,but also help to promote the “going global” of Chinese children's literature.