The Translation Of Foregrounding Language About Characters In Novels

Foregrounding is a core concept of functional stylistics.The theory originated from the concept of “defamiliarization” of Russian formalism,first proposed by Mukarovsky in the book Standard Language and Poetry Language.Later,many scholars continued to enrich and develop and the theory of foregrounding has been widely used and studied in stylistics,linguistics and literary creation and research.As an important form for literariness,the reproduction of foregrounding language is one of the important means of literary translation,and it is one of the important indicators to measure and evaluate the quality of translation.Therefore,exploring translators' handling of the foregrounding language helps to ensure the genuineness of the original literariness in translations,and also helps to provide a new measure for the quality evaluation of the fiction translation.In this context,this paper attempts to use the foregrounding theory to compare and analyze how the foregrounding language depicting Dean's character in the original text of "On the Road" is translated in its two Chinese versions and what differences do they impact the image of Dean.In fiction translation,one of the outstanding problems is that the translation looks roughly the same as the original text,but in fact,their literary values differ a lot.This phenomenon was called by Shen Dan as "false equivalence." The reason exists in that many translators only consider the language form of the original text and ignore the content while translating.Especially when some parts in the original text are contrary to the normal situation in the translator's view,the translator will intentionally make so-called “reasonable” changes.Such a translation seems to correspond to the original text,but actually damages the original meaning and aesthetic value.Foregrounding language is the unification of form and content,and its use plays a vital role in advancing the theme,portraying characters and highlighting humorous effects.On the Road is known as the Bible of the "Beat Generation" and its popularity is undoubtedly inseparable from the image of Dean in the novel.The shaping of Dean's image is closely related to the "spontaneous writing" style of Kerouac.Therefore,it isnecessary to conduct in-depth case studies on the foregrounding language of Dean's image in these two translations,and provide more vivid cases for the translation of characters in fiction translation.Through the comparison of foregrounding language depicting the image of Dean in the two translations,this paper mainly draws the following conclusions: From the perspective of foregrounding language quantity,there is not distinct difference in the two translations;but from the perspective of the quality of maintaining the foregrounding language,Wen's translation is better than Wang's.It is mainly reflected in the translation strategies applied by Wen: supplementing,maintaining English and exerting Chinese advantages.It not only preserves the foreground language form of the characters in the original text,but also retains the typical character image of Dean highlighted by the situational language..The Wang translation is more of a form of foreground language that preserves the original character image.