On The Translation Of Fortress Besieged

The study of style can be simply defined as stylistics. Literary stylistics refers to the school of stylistics whose fundamental aim is to interpret the thematic significance and aesthetic values of a literary text. The combination of literary stylistics—an emerging linguistic branch with a disciplinary nature—and translation studies, is significantly innovative and enlightening. Although some scholars have made remarkable achievements in this field, still a systematic and profound study on it is unfortunately inadequate.In this paper, the authoress, by employing the translation of Fortress Besieged as a case study, attempts to prove that, as a linguistic theory and discipline, literary stylistics not only has a practical guiding significance for the process of translating but also provides a theoretical system for the assessment and criticism of translated works. By illustrating examples from the translation of Fortress Besieged, the authoress puts great efforts in analyzing how the translators convey and enhance the aesthetic effects and thematic significance through the choices of language means, so as to draw the conclusion that the marriage of literary stylistics and translation studies, especially fictional translation, should be applauded.This research is carried out on a theoretical basis of translation principles combined with linguistic involvement—literary stylistics—to be specific. Besides this, the authoress also touches on some basic and important principles of rhetoric, aesthetics, psychology and philosophy, as the interpretation of prose fiction is a complex intellectual activity that involves a variety of subjects.The paper consists of two major parts: Part I is devoted to the establishment of a fresh theoretical system which combines literary stylistics with translation studies. Drawing information from Professor Shen Dan's Literary Stylistics and Fictional Translation and G. Leech and M. Short's Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose and some other works on literary stylistics, the authoress puts forward this translation theoretical system, in which literary stylistics is applied into fictional translation. This system consists of four aspects which represent four different levels of this application, namely: lexicon, rhetoric, syntax and discourse. Part II is a solid case study in which the theoretical system is applied into the specific translation of Fortress Besieged. By doing this, the authoress analyses and assesses the translation in the view of literary stylistics, and suggests some remedy for its inadequate or incorrect translation.As literary stylistics is a discipline mediating between literary criticism and linguistics at different levels, it has the advantage of being more scientific, objective and more reasonable. When it is applied to translation studies, it will surely transform the traditional impressionistic and intuitive method of doing as well as evaluating prose fictional translations. Thus it enriches translation studies by providing an objective, systematic, and scientific approach to it. And this is the very significance of the paper.