On The Reproduction Of Style Of Simplicity And Beauty In The English Translation Of Cao Wenxuan’s Children’s Novels

The study of style has always been a hot topic in literary and translation circles,and the study of the English translation of children’s literary works is thus very important.Cao Wenxuan,as one of the typical representatives of Chinese children’s literature going abroad,has his typical writing style studied in relevant research.However,compared with the research on the style of Cao Wenxuan’s works,the translation studies on his style reproduction account for a small proportion.Taking Qingtong Kuihua as a case study,the thesis tends to explore the delivery of Cao Wenxuan’s language style in the translation by Helen Wang.The thesis defines the language style of Cao Wenxuan’s children’s literature as the style of simplicity and beauty.Simplicity refers to Cao’s plain writing feature.Beauty means the aesthetic effect expressed in Cao Wenxuan’s plain writing,which could be subdivided into beauty of form and beauty of meaning.Based on Liu Miqing’s stylistic markers theory,the thesis explores the reproduction of the style of simplicity and beauty in terms of lexical markers,syntactic markers and markers of figure of speech in the corpus-based comparative study of the source text Qingtong Kuihua and the English version by Helen Wang.The reasons why the translator uses the translation methods are also included.It is found that the reproduction of the original style of simplicity and beauty is basically achieved with the combination of the frequent-used correspondence and other flexible methods.At the lexical markers,Helen Wang has applied the method of semantic correspondence in the translation of basic color terms and the method of partial correspondence in the subordinate color words,achieved direct correspondence of auditory image of onomatopoeic words and flexible translation of other images,as well as the correspondence in [ABCB]-patterned and [AAB]-patterned reduplicated words.At the syntactic markers,she has realized the overall semantic correspondence in orderly and scattered sentences and the flexible translation of various verb forms in ba-sentence.At the markers of figure of speech,she has achieved the partial correspondence of parallel syntactic structures,the semantic correspondence in rhetorical colors of simile as well as the formal correspondence in sound effect of songs.The preference for the use of correspondence and other flexible methods has something to do with the translator’s life experience and translation concept,as well as with many other factors,such as differences and similarities of languages and the limitation of translatability.