On Reproduction Of Literariness In The English Translation Of Feizhan

This thesis takes Xi Xi’s novel Feizhan which is translated by Diana Yue into Flying Carpet: A Tale of Fertillia,as the research object.Flying Carpet is a typical work of “fairytale realism”,a unique style created by Xi Xi.The novel features bold imagination,fairytale-like narration and a somber tone.It depicts the mundane life of ordinary people during the one-hundred-year colonial history of Hong Kong.In the English version of the novel,the translator tries to keep its stylistic and linguistic features by reproducing literariness properties of the original text.Literariness was first put forward by Roman Jakobson as the object of literary science.It refers to the sum of special linguistic and formal properties that distinguish literary texts from non-literary ones.These properties endow a literary text with the effect of what Victor Shklovsky proposed as defamiliarization.It is an effect which serves to refresh habitual perception of life by presenting the unfamiliar aspects of familiar objects,often through the means of difficult forms.Devices by which literary works achieve defamiliarization usually consist in the foregrounding of linguistic and formal features.This thesis holds that in Flying Carpet,the foregrounded formal properties are mainly created by various rhetoric devices.The thesis conducts a descriptive study on the reproduction of literariness at the linguistic and rhetoric levels through a comparison between the source and target texts.The data analysis leads to the following findings: First,the overall tendency of the translator is to ensure the translation is readable.Second,at the linguistic level,the translator adopts various strategies with transliteration and annotation to represent the defamiliarized effect of dialect,loanwords and idiosyncratic expressions.Third,at the rhetorical level,the translator has creatively reproduced the literary effect of various rhetoric devices.