A Study On English-Chinese Translation Of Fictional Dialogue

This thesis is intended for the study of fictional dialogue in the narrow sense - -- the dialogue between characters in fiction, mainly in the form of direct speech within quotation marks. Fictional dialogue has idiosyncratic, socio-cultural, communicative and aesthetic characteristics and it has important functions to reveal characters, advance stories and interest readers. Few monographs at home and abroad have specifically discussed the translation of fictional dialogue. Just a few chapters can be found touching on the issue. In the foreign language master journals published in the past decade, just a few articles are found to deal with the translation of fictional dialogue. In these limited materials available, it is noted that not a few theories, including literary stylistics, ethnolinguistics, sociolinguistics, pragmatics, discourse analysis and aesthetics, have studied fictional dialogue and its translation from different angles with their own advantages, but none of the research so far is systematic and overall. Bakhtin's theory involves linguistics, literature, philosophy, culture and other humane studies. As the core of Bakhtin's theories of novel, dialogism reveals many layers of dialogic relationship in novel: author-reader, author-character, character- character, character-self, character-reader and novel-novel. The theory emphasizes the context, intonation and extralinguistic features of fictional dialogue and reveals the socio-cultural-ideological, communicative nature of fictional dialogue. Bakhtin's theory, which shares some viewpoints with sociosemiotics, sometimes, is called ocio-ideological semiotics? Although Bakhtin's theory provides us with research principles of fictional dialogue on the ontological and epistemological levels, it lacks a methodology to analyze fictional dialogue and guide its translation practice. Based on Bakhtin's theory of dialogism, particularly on his research of the dialogue between characters, this thesis carries out a comparative study of fictional dialogue between Chinese and English fiction in the aspects of literary, linguistic and socio-cultural conventions. The thesis explores various problems posed by the English-Chinese translation of fictional dialogue and reveals the bilingual, bi- literal7y and bi-socio-cultural characteristics of the translation of fictional dialogue. The transference of the meaning of fictional dialogue by interpreting its context, intonation and extrahnguistic features is considered as the essence in the translation of fictional dialogue. The present thesis argues for the sociosemiotic approach as a methodology to study the translation of fictional dialogue according to the affinity between Bakhtin's theory and sociosemiotics --- both theories emphasize the non-linguistic feature and the socio-cultural-ideological nature of fictional dialogue. Trough the extensively practical analysis of the examples in the English-Chinese translation of fictional dialogue in Pride and Prejudice, David Copperfield, Vanity Fair, Jane Eyre, For Whom the Bell Tolls, etc., it is shown that the specific problems posed by English-Chinese translation of fictional dialogue, concerning the translation of modal particles, reporting verbs, nonverbal signs, address terms, idiolects, dialects, aesthetic effects in form, meaning and sound can be solved by employing various translation strategies which are suggested under the guidance of the sociosemiotic approach. It is found in the study that the sociosemiotic approach established on the theory of sociosemiotic...