A Study Of Stylistic Reproduction In Ten Chinese Versions Of "the Furnished Room" From The Perspective Of Literary Stylistics

As a well-known American realist novelist,O’Henry is very popular in China,with more than 60 translations.As a watershed of O’Henry’s writing style,“The Furnished Room” is underestimated.Most researches focus on rhetorical techniques,but less on its ingenious conception and unique stylistic features.The present author finds that ten versions such as Zhang Jinghao’s,Wang Zhongnian’s,and Wang Ji’s version dealt with the stylistic features of the source text in different ways,and the thematic meaning and aesthetic effects conveyed are also different.How do translators reproduce the stylistic style of the source text,and what “deceptive equivalence” are there? What’s the reason?Hence,this thesis analyzes the source text and its ten Chinese versions from the lexical,syntactical,rhetorical,and cohesive level to conduct stylistic analysis and discuss stylistic reproduction.Then,this thesis will analyze “deceptive equivalence”and explain its reasons based on the theory proposed by Professor Shen Dan.It can be found that all versions reproduce the source text to a certain extent,but there are also cases of “deceptive equivalence”,which are caused by the following reasons.At the content level,translators may ignore original author’s intention and context,regarding some plots as “unreasonable” and making changes,which actually damages the thematic meaning and aesthetic effects.At the formal level,translators sometimes may ignore the stylistic meaning of the language form itself,and only take whether the same content is conveyed as the criterion to judge the quality of translation,which often results in “deceptive equivalence”.In addition,translators sometimes ignore the inherent characteristics of the source language cultural system and under-consider cultural differences,resulting in “deceptive equivalence” in cross-cultural translation.Through analysis and comparison,it is found that it’s easier to result in “deceptive equivalence” in register deviation,graphological deviation and tense deviation.All ten versions fail to reproduce the stylistic features of source text totally.Besides,translations of syntactical deviation and allusions in figures of speech are also difficult for translators.Most of them restore the special sentence order of inversion and omission into the normal order.Some translations of allusion are “deceptive equivalence” due to cultural differences and other factors.Therefore,translators need to raise their stylistic awareness,pay attention to language forms,and faithfully convey these stylistic features to target readers with reference to the context and cultural background.This research enriches related researches of O’Henry’s short story “The Furnished Room”.From the perspective of literary stylistics,this thesis analyzes the stylistic reproduction and “deceptive equivalence” in those ten Chinese versions more objectively,and explores the reasons for “deceptive equivalence” in order to enhance translators’ stylistic awareness and literary appreciation ability.