A Tentative Approach To The English Translation Of Chinese Avant-Garde Fiction

China’s avant-garde literature,as a new school of writing,gained prominence in the late 1980 s.Representative writers are Ma Yuan,Su Tong,Can Xue,Ge Fei,Yu Hua,Sun Ganlu and Bei Cun.Deeply influenced by new literary concepts introduced from the West,the avant-garde writers endeavor to contradict many long-cherished literary ideologies.In their literary creation,they emphasize “how to write” rather than “what to write” and attach great importance to the artistic beauty and value of literature itself so as to subvert the tradition of writing as a political act.They set off a“carnival of narration”,and the language and narrative experimentation have become their most distinctive marks.Their bold literary experimentation has also aroused the attention of literary scholars both at home and abroad.Since the 1990s,Chinese avant-garde fictions have been introduced into the West and have attracted many scholars’ attention.However,the review of the previous studies reveals that most of them focus on Chinese avant-garde fiction’s historical background,literary techniques and its relationship with the western post-modern literature.However,there are few studies concentrating on the analysis of the translation itself.Therefore,the present thesis attempts to summarize the translation strategies adopted by western translators in translating the original linguistic and narrative experimentation and analyze the corresponding effects.The present thesis employs theories from Stylistics and Narratology as the theoretical basis and uses text comparison method to conduct a descriptive study of the translation of the foregrounded language,narrative perspectives and non-linear narration of the original texts.China’s Avant-Garde Fiction: An Anthology edited by Wang Jing is taken as the research object of the present study.The anthology contains14 works of 7 representative Chinese avant-garde writers so it can provide a panoramic view of Chinese avant-garde literature to some extent.It is found that translators adopt multiple translation methods in dealing with the original language and narrative experimentation.However,some foregrounded expressions are rewritten by translators which does harm to the transference of the original aesthetic effect and style.To be specific,in translating the original foregrounded language,translators tend to faithfully transfer the original semantic deviation into the translated texts,while “normalize” or even delete the phonetic and lexical deviations probably due to grammatical restrictions and consideration of western readers’ acceptance.But the “normalized” expressions are deviated from the original texts and therefore offer a distorted image of Chinese avant-garde fictions to western readers.In terms of the narrative experimentation,the Chinese avant-gardists tend to employ both the internal and external perspectives and multiple internal perspectives to reveal different possibilities of interpreting the same story so as to expose the fictional nature of their works.After close comparison between original texts with translations,it is found that most of the original narrative perspectives are well retained but some are changed due to translator’s addition or deletion of some specific expressions.Influenced by western post-modern literature and magic realism,Chinese avant-gardists attempt to break away from the traditional linear narrative technique and to adopt a more flexible and multi-layered narrative structure.It is found that,however,translators tend to clarify and simplify the original complicated narrative structure.