Discourse Modality And Character Recreation In Literary Translation

Interpersonal metafunction,according to systemic functional linguistics,is one of language's three main metafunctions.It means that people use language to express interpersonal meaning.One of the most important components of interpersonal meaning is modal meaning which is realized by a major semantic category,modality.Modality is an important grammatical category in human languages that can to a great extent reflect speaker's attitude which is greatly influenced by speaker's character.Therefore,there is a close relationship between speaker's character and the modality in his/her discourse.Properly used modality can contribute a lot to creating typical characters,and characters can be analyzed in turn through the modality in speaker's discourse.A successful literary work generally creates several typical characters.Therefore modality translation is of paramount importance to character recreation in literary translation,which deserves enough attention of translators.However,research done in this field has been quite little till now,waiting for further study.This research adopts the systemic functional approach to investigate Tuesdays with Morrie and its Chinese version,hoping to clarify how the reconstruction of modal meaning contributes to character recreation in literary translation.Tuesdays with Morrie written by the famous American columnist Mitch Albom is a memoir which is composed of an old man,a young man,and life's greatest lesson.This volume after its publication has remained on many bestseller lists throughout the America for nearly four years.It presents readers two figures of full and exquisite character through rich modal expressions.This thesis chooses Wu Hong's version for detailed reading and comparative analysis,conducting a quantitative and qualitative research.This thesis firstly analyzes the role of discourse modality in character creation.Then it discusses the contribution of modality translation to character recreation.Finally,this thesis makes great efforts to make clear the influence of modality translation on character recreation.Based on the characteristics of Wu's modality translation,the writer also tries to criticize his translation and deduce the translation principle and translation strategies he has adopted to reconstruct discourse modality and to recreate characters.The conclusion drawn in this thesis is that different characteristics of three variables of modality in two characters' discourse,namely modality type,orientation,and value,do contributes to their character creation.Wu's version is basically faithful to the original discourse modality except some conversions in terms of modality type,orientation and value.It's concluded that Wu Hong adopted the complete equivalent conversion strategy and flexible dynamic conversion strategy under the guidance of dynamic faithfulness principle in his translation practice.This study also finds that there are several weak points in Wu's version,which influences the character recreation in a certain degree.This study tries to apply the systemic functional linguistics into literary translation criticism.Hopefully,it can offer some helpful points to translation criticism and appreciation as well as translation teaching.