A Study On Translation Of Defamiliarized Language In Mrs. Dalloway Based On New Criticism

This study focuses on the translation of defamiliarized language in literary texts.As a form of art,literature is rooted in daily life but superior to life.It is the fruit of the author's artistic and rhetorical expression of ordinary people,things and objects.The artistic language in literary works makes the familiar things unfamiliar and distant,and it takes more time for readers to understand the language,but just for this reason,it gives readers a fresh and amazing reading experience,as well as a renewed perspective of looking at life.This kind of language is called defamiliarized language.Mrs.Dalloway is one of the masterpieces of Virginia Wolf,and a great novel of stream of consciousness.The author describes the life episodes and the flowing of consciousness of Clarissa with the techniques of “stream of consciousness.” There are lots of defamiliarized language breaking the rules and conventions of language in form and meaning,which adds freshness and joy to the novel,as well as increases the time of reading and the difficulties of understanding.As for translators,if they want to translate this novel for readers of other languages,the first step they need to do is to have a close reading and thorough analysis of the source text.Only in this way can they make the target text more faithful to the source text.Previous studies on the translation of Mrs.Dalloway are few in number.On one hand,most of them focus on a single point,such as the language of stream of consciousness,techniques of rhythm,poetic language,coherence of paragraphs,and metaphor.On the other hand,as for the perspectives of research,most researches study the translation from translators' creativity,readers' reception,social culture and so on.The former is limited in research objectives,so they cannot have a complete conclusion of the features and translation methods of the defamiliarized language in Mrs.Dalloway.The latter is from the external-text perspective,the research may be subjective.They neglect the fact that the objective object of the translation research should be the text,only focusing on the source text and the target text can a faithful translation and objective translation criticism be guaranteed.New Criticism is a theory of literary criticism.It especially fits the semantic analysis of texts which are profound in meaning and difficult to understand.It focuses on the texts,and excludes the interference of the author,readers and social elements,therefore,the analysis is more objective.This kind of criticism theory can not only be applied to guide the translation practice of translators,but also help readers judge different translation versions based on the comparison and analysis of the texts.The thesis mainly adopts the theories of literary ontology,structure-texture,context,close-reading of New Criticism.It regards Mrs.Dalloway as a case,by making a close reading and analysis of the translation of defamiliarized punctuation,phonetics,words,rhetoric,syntax,and style in the two Chinese translation versions of Wang Jiaxiang and Jiang Xiangming to explore how translators should apply the theories and methods of New Criticism to better understand the source text and then choose proper translation strategies and methods to make the target text faithful to the source text.Meanwhile,it discusses the methods and standard of translation criticism.The research methods used in this thesis include literature research method,close reading method,and qualitative methods.The research is guided by New Criticism and based on text analysis,trying to explore the method of translating defamiliarized language and the standard of translation criticism.The research finds out that the defamiliarized language in Mrs.Dalloway can be divided into two types: one is a kind of language that is really strange to readers,and the other is that the author transforms the form and meaning of the language to create the defamiliarized language.Besides,in responding to the research questions,firstly,the two translators can generally recognize and understand the form and contextual meaning of the defamiliarized language.Secondly,the two translators use different strategies and methods to translate the defamiliarized language,which makes the two Chinese versions take on different styles.Wang Jiaxiang tends to employ foreignization,and the target text is generally faithful to the source text in form and contextual meaning,which generally reproduces the effects of defamiliarization.Jiang Xiangming tends to employ domestication.He applies the creativity of translators and transforms the source text to make it understandable to target text readers,but the effects of defamiliarization are more lost.According to that,we can see different translation views of translators can create different styles of translation versions.Thirdly,in thetranslation of defamiliarized punctuation,phonetics,and syntax,because of different language systems,the effects of defamiliarization are lost in the target text.The translators compensate the loss by adding annotations,emphasizing words,and paraphrasing.At last,in order to decrease the loss of defamiliarization,the translators should apply the theories and methods of New Criticism to translation.They should firstly make a close reading and analysis of the source text based on context,then,they can produce a better translation.The innovative points of this research are represented in two aspects.Firstly,it applies the literary criticism theory to the translation of defamiliarized language,focuses on the source text and the target text,and breaks the convention of studying the translation from an external-text perspective,which turns translation back to the text research.Besides,the classification of the defamiliarized language is more detailed and complete,which helps the study of the translation of defamiliarized language.The research significance is that the application of New Criticism to translation of defamiliarized language in Mrs.Dalloway on one hand can help translators have a careful analysis and understanding of the defamiliarized language in novels of stream-consciousness so as to explore ways to make the target text more faithful to the source text.On the other hand,the text analysis method of New Criticism provides new perspectives for readers and researchers to judge different translation versions.