On Style Reproduction Of Characters' Speech In Pygmalion-from The Perspective Of Register Analysis

Characters'speech is an integral part in literary works. Highly individualized, it plays an indispensable part in depicting characters'personality, promoting the development of the plot, entertaining the readers and reproducing the style of a writer. Pygmalion is a play with highly featured characters'speech, thus creating lively and vivid characters with their distinctive personalities.Numerous accounts on style reproduction have been written through the whole history of translation studies. Whether style reproduction is appropriate or not determines the success or failure of translation. The researches on style reproduction constitute an important part of translation theoretical and practical researches. As regards the definition of style, there have been no unanimous opinions. This thesis is devoted to an exploration of definition of style and translatability of style. This thesis, based on characters'speech in Pygmalion, attempts an analysis of style reproduction, and conducts a comparative study between the two Chinese versions: one made by Yang Xianyi and the other translated by Lin Yutang respectively.Since style reproduction of the original is a challenging and difficult task, we have to resort to relevant linguistic theories, in particular– register theory. Register is composed of three variables, that is, field of discourse, tenor of discourse and mode of discourse. In order to reproduce the original style, register equivalence must be attained, namely, equivalence of field, tenor and mode.The originality of this thesis consists in the attempt to compare two Chinese versions of Pygmalion from a relatively new perspective and find out the necessity and feasibility of applying register theory to style reproduction of characters'speech abounding with distinctive features. This thesis chooses Pygmalion as the study object and selects some typical examples for analysis. The author attempts to prove that register theory is of practical value in translation studies of style reproduction.