Analysis Of The Translation Of Stylistic Markedness In Dubliners

Stylistic marker is one important concept put forward by Geoffrey N. Leech, awell-known English stylist, concerning the practical way on how to carry out detailedstylistic analysis in his Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English FictionalProse(1981). The concept provides the reader insight into the possibility and necessityof the cooperation of literary stylistics, literary translation and markness theory.Stylistics observes the style of literary works with guide of modern linguistictheory. Stylistic study is usually divided into general stylistics and literary stylisticsthe latter of which is the focus of this dissertation. Literary stylistics is a kind ofliterary critical methods based on linguistics, which aims at exploring the textualaesthetic value by means of describing and analyzing the linguistic elementsintentionally chosen and their corresponding literary effects. Consequently, literarystylistics can be viewed as the bridge connecting linguistics and literary criticism,which shares with literary translation characterized by its academic hybrid. Stylisticstudy focuses on the combination of both the intuitive perception of the literary textand the linguistic analysis, while literary translation, with the goal of faithfulness,smoothness and elegance, requires the dynamic equivalent in the balanced realizationof the aesthetic value between the readers of original language and those of targetlanguage on the basis of linguistic communication. The effective transformation inlinguistic level and aesthetic achievement in literary aesthetic level shown in literarytranslation indicate the potential sharing parts between literary stylistics andtranslation for the possibility of the cooperation of the two fields.Furthermore, the necessity of cooperation exists between literary stylistics andtranslation. The reason is that there is deceptive equivalence in literary translation,which is not only due to the translators' language inefficiency, but more importantlyto his inadequate awareness of taking stylistic knowledge into translationconsideration in the process of translation. Therefore, the two academic fields shouldbe joined together to work out a possible way to fulfill the translation's function ofcultural communication through the effective rendering of the literary essence of the original works to readers of the target language.However, literary stylistics and translation are two profound fields of learning. Itis beyond my ability to tackle so large a topic, the study domain will concentrate onstyle markers with the introduction of markedness theory, including the elaboration ofthe flexibility of cooperating literary stylistics and markedness, as well as the possiblecriteria to define style markers in the literary works.As to the selection of the research text, Dubliners by James Joyce is chosen withon the ground that Joyce is famous for his intentional violation of language norms toachieve certain literary purpose, so it can serve as a sound database for investigatingthe different translation strategies by different translators with regard to stylisticmarkers. The analysis is divided into two parts, synchronically and diachronically. Inthe first part, the thesis analyzes the translation of the style markers in the final part ofThe Dead in this short story collection, based on the categorization methodsrecommended by Leech in his A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry(1967). Thesecond part is devoted to the elaboration on the translation of the [smile] style marker,based on Bakhtin's carnival theory.All in all, it is concluded that literary works can be regarded as a collection of themeaningful markers, which contains the implication of bringing thought-provokinginformation to readers. Translation of literary works should show more concern withthe adequate realization of style markers in the target language in order to achieve thegoal of mutual communication between two cultures.