A Study On The English Representation Of The Linguistic Style Of Shen Congwen's Stories From The Perspective Of Chinese Deviated Rhetoric

Based on the definition of linguistic style from the perspective of deviated rhetoric,the view which describes linguistic style as features of language use and Li Yunhan's elucidation of it as “a writer's idiolect”,the present research attempts to define “a writer's idiolect” as the aggregation of all the deviated rhetorical language use(or DRLU for short)recurrent in a writer's works which reveals how the writer tunes sounds,chooses words and sentences,employs rhetorical devices,arranges the text and so on.Given the above analysis,the present research,taking the perspective of deviated rhetoric,aims to evaluate how the linguistic style of Shen Congwen's stories or,in other words,how Shen's idiolect or idiosyncrasy is generally represented in English translations by examining how DRLU recurrent in Shen's stories is reproduced in English translations.The author finds that in the research of Chinese deviated rhetoric,researchers in general fail to adequately define the key term “deviated rhetoric” and they have not yet agreed on what the reference frame is for deviation,which makes it impossible for their studies to provide workable guidelines and a generally agreed-upon criterion for identifying DRLU.Besides,different researchers adopt different criteria to classify DRLU,and to make things worse,even the same researchers categorize DRLU from different perspectives in their own research,which inevitably results in the reappearance of essentially the same DRLU in different categories under different labels.Therefore,it is safe to say that most of their research on deviated rhetoric is independent from each other and has not yet shaped into a unified theoretical system of deviated rhetoric and thus can not be directly adopted as the theoretical guide for this study or applied to the empirical analysis in the present research.Nevertheless,the researchers' elaboration on the structure of various kinds of DRLU as well as on their rhetorical effects assisted by abundant case studies does exemplify how the structures and rhetorical effects of the DRLU in Shen's stories can be analyzed and even how the English representations of these DRLUs can be evaluated.Given the above analysis,the author introduces into the present research two concepts,namely “negative rhetoric” and “positive rhetoric” proposed by Chen Wangdao in his theoretical system of Chinese rhetoric and points out that they are respectively equivalent to “normal rhetoric” and “deviated rhetoric”.Based on this premise,the present research,by designating “normal rhetoric”(or “negative rhetoric”)as the reference frame for deviation,and using the principles of positive rhetoric put forward by Chen Wangdao as principles of deviated rhetoric,manages to restructure the sub-system of “positive rhetoric” in Chen's system of Chinese rhetoric into the basic structure of the framework of Chinese deviated rhetoric.With principles of deviated rhetoric and the new reference frame for deviation serving as the yardstick with which the deviating nature of language uses is gauged,the deviating nature of the so-called DRLU summed up in the research on Chinese deviated rhetoric is reexamined,and the survivors of the reexamination are subsumed within different parts of the basic structure to form into an open framework of Chinese deviated rhetoric.This theorization is believed to have included all the merits of other researchers' deviated rhetoric studies and therefore can well serve as the theoretical and structural framework for the study on the English representation of the linguistic style of Shen's stories.Under the guidance of this theoretical framework,the author,through a comparative and contrastive close reading of Shen's stories and of their English versions,singles out six DRLUs recurrent in Shen's different stories which reveals how the author tunes sounds,chooses words and sentences,and employs rhetorical devices.The six DRLUs are used as parameters for the study of how the linguistic style of Shen's stories is represented in English translations.Detailed case studies of the above-mentioned six DRLUs and their translations yield the following findings.In translating “anomalous collocations”,what translators focus on is in most cases the transfer of the original meaning while ignoring to a great extent the reproduction of their unique aesthetic or poetic implications.Take the translation of “echo of words or morphemes” for instance.Studies show that only 43.8 percent of translations have transferred the meaning of the words or morphemes which echo each other and at the same time manage to recreate the echoing effect in the translated texts.Take the representation of “folk languages” as another example.In transferring “dialectal swearwords”,most translators tend to transfer their literal or pragmatic meaning,to the neglect of representing their swearing function and other pragmatic effects.As far as the transfer of “local sayings” is concerned,only 36 percent of translations have conveyed their pragmatic meaning and represented their forms of expression.Take the translation of “rhyming in narrative discourse” for a further instance.Only 17 percent of translations have partially or fully represented the rhyme.Even if translators attempt to represent the rhyme,their translations end up problematic in most cases,having thus deviated to a great extent from how Shen uses rhymes.As far as the translation of “metaphors” is concerned,although 83.3 percent of translations of “metaphors with A ? B,C sentence pattern” manage to represent the rhetorical device,due to the inapporiate translation of the key words in “C”,the metaphors in the TT either turn out to be invalid or fail to achieve equivalent or approximately equivalent rhetorical effects with those in the ST.In translating “interdependent metaphors”,translators either fail to adequately transfer the meanings of sub-metaphors,or to fully represent the rhetorical device and the rhetorical effects of each sub-metaphor,the correlation and echoing effect of sub-metaphors as well as the aggregated rhetorical effects achieved by using one sub-metaphors in conjunction with another.As for the translation of “malapropism”,only 22.2% of translations manage to achieve equivalent rhetorical effects with the ST through reproducing malapropism in the TT.Analysis indicates that most translators tend to transfer the meaning of DRLUs,to the neglect of the representation of its form and rhetorical effects.Therefore,the author of the present paper,judging from the perspective of deviated rhetoric,holds that the linguistic style of Shen's stories is,in many cases,not fully represented.This tendency of translating DRLUs,on the one hand,reveals the universal features of translation put forward by Mona Baker,which include a marked rise in the level of explicitness,a tendency towards disambiguation and simplification,a strong preference for conventional grammaticality,a tendency to avoid repetions,a general tendency to exaggerate features of the target language,etc.,and on the other hand,indicates,to some extent,how the position occupied by translations in the social and literary systems of the target culture conditions the translation strategies that are employed.If it is secondary,translators tend to use existing target-culture models for the TT and produce inadequate translations.Besides,this tendency of translating DRLU is also closely related to the following factors.Firstly,translators have generally failed to fully understand the linguistic style of Shen's stories and thus neglected the key role played by the representation of deviated rhetoric in the representation of the linguistic style of Shen's stories.Secondly,even if native English translators are highly proficient in both Chinese and English reading and writing,compared with Chinese native counterparts,they all the while lack acute perceptiveness or sensitivity to Chinese,and therefore can not fully understand the DRLU and the poetic implications it contains,let alone fully representing it.native Chinese translators,however,find it easier to identify various kinds of DRLU,but due to their lack of sensitivity to English and linguistic competence,they have likewise failed to convey the stylistic information.Thirdly,the huge disparity between English and Chinese poses a great challenge for the representation of DRLU and the transfer of its aesthetic implications.The author holds that in order to adequately represent the linguistic style of Shen's stories,translators should read Shen's stories both intensively and extensively so as to gain acute sensitivity to the linguistic features in Shen's stories such as various kinds of DRLU which indicate the stylistic features of the ST.Based on this premise,if it is possible to get both native Chinese and English translators involved in the translation process,the former would be able to fully exploit their acute sensitivity to Chinese to identify DRLUs in the ST and decode the aesthetic implications contained in it and the latter would be able to fully exploit their linguistic competence to render DRLUs in the ST with DRLUs in the TT so as to adequately represent the rhetorical effects of the DRLUs in the ST and convey the stylistic information these DRLUs carry.In this way,a true Shen Congwen as one of the world-famous novelist is expected to be fully exhibited to the English-speaking world.