A Study Of Narrative Perspectives In Biography And The Corresponding English-Chinese Translation

Hans Christian Andersen,written by R.Nisbet Bain,is a biography that introduces the life of the King of Fairy Tales—Hans Christian Andersen.This report takes the translation of Chapter 12 to Chapter 15 of this biography as a case study.This part of source text introduces the creation of some of Andersen's fairy tales and his travelling experience.A prominent feature of the original text is that it involves different types of narrative perspectives and shows a strong degree of literariness.This report discusses the translation of biographical texts with a focus on the use of narrative perspectives.Narrative perspectives can be classified into omniscient perspective,internal perspective and external perspective.The internal perspective narrates from the standpoint of the characters in the story,highlighting feelings and thoughts of the characters and reflecting the personality and emotional orientation of the characters.However,when translated into Chinese,due to specific characteristics of the Chinese language,such as the lack of tense markers,the use of internal perspective often becomes implicit.Hence this report explores how to make internal narrative perspective explicit through the use of particular language forms in translation.It mainly focuses on the use of deixis,expressions that convey strong emotions,and different modes of discourse presentation.In the process of translation,firstly the source text is examined in detail to figure out the internal perspective through those three language forms and the context of the original text.Secondly internal perspective in the target text is accentuated by using the deixis,emotive expressions and discourse presentation modes.This report concludes that we can use these linguistic indicators to make such narrative feature explicit in translation so as to restore the narrative effect and the vitality of the characterization and the literariness of the original text.