Literariness,Cultural Values And Ideology:A Comparative Study Of The Language Styles Of Eileen Chang,Yu Guangzhong And Wu Lao's Translations Of The Old Man And The Sea

This thesis compares the linguistic styles of the three translations of The Old Man and the Sea offered by Eileen Chang,Yu Guangzhong and Wu Lao.Each translation has a distinctive language style that reveals some important trends in the development of modern written Chinese.This thesis describes how each linguistic style is formed on word and syntactic levels and analyzes the underlying esthetics,cultural identities and ideologies of each translator.Yu's language is highly rhythmic and economical,and he actually introduces the features of poetry writing into his fiction translation by doing so.Culturally and ideologically,his translation shows his intimacy with the linguistic and cultural tradition of China.Chang's prose is natural and formal,neither domesticated nor over foreignized.This shows her distance from the national tradition,the proletarian thoughts and the Western values at once and her translation achieves an overall effect of literary detachment.Wu's language style is contradictory,embodying a proletarian diction,a colloquial style and a Europeanized syntax at the same time.Corresponding to this is his mixed ideologies,conforming to the socialist policy on word level while exerting individual and literary freedom on syntactic level.This thesis further argues that the linguistic features that can be found in the three translations are common and typical in modern baihua(or vernacular Chinese).Ever since the May Fourth Movement established baihua as the new written standard in place of wenyan,the daily speech has become an important linguistic resource for modern written Chinese.However,either considering the insufficiencies of the spoken language or motivated by a cultural intimacy with the national tradition,many writers would reverse this trend and introduce the features of wenyan into baihua writing.Meanwhile Western languages have also been exerting a strong influence on modern written Chinese,and as a result many Europeanized expressions have been created.In the development of modern baihua,the daily speech,wenyan and Europeanized expressions are three important linguistic resources,and this historical fact shows that political and cultural factors have played a no less important role than literary considerations in literary language in modern China.This thesis also extends E.D.Hirsch's hermeneutic theory into translation studies and points out the distance between the translator's intention and the reader's appreciation in terms language style.This means readers from different age groups,with different educational backgrounds or with different esthetic values may perceive the linguistic style of the same translation differently.