On Translation Of William Faulkner's Works From The Literary Stylistic Perspective

Regarding the verbal form of literary works, poetry attracts much more attention than prose does, for it is widely maintained that prose is paraphrasable and thus the linguistic facts are not so significant. Moreover, traditional concept holds that in translation to represent the "spirit" of literary works is of paramount importance. As a result, the fictional form is frequently discounted in translation. This paper is written for the purpose of making its due contribution to improve the situation.There is a long history of the study of style in both China and the West. With rapid development of modern linguistics, stylistics began to develop into many schools. One of them is literary stylistics which aims to explore the thematic and aesthetic significance of literary texts through analyzing the style markers. Style in Fiction by Leech and Short is a representative in introducing literary stylistics.William Faulkner, a renowned writer as well as stylist, is known especially for his remarkable achievement in the verbal form of his fictions. Examples in this paper are taken from three of his works (i.e. The Sound and the Fury, A Rose for Emily and Barn Burning) as well as their translated versions.Chapter One first gives a brief introduction of style and literary stylistics, followed by a discussion of the necessity of applying literary stylistics to fictional translation, and then, a general literature review is given. Theoretic foundation is laid in Chapter Two: Leech and Short's method of analysis suggested in Style in Fiction is adopted for the present study. Chapter Three contains the detailed analysis of some stylistic features of three Faulkner's writings and reveals the enlightening value of those features for translational studies by comparing different translated versions, which then leads to the conclusive part of Chapter Four.In one word, this paper discusses translation of William Faulkner's works so as to evidence the value of literary stylistics for fictional translation.