Translation Strategies Of Three Special Sentence Types In Strange Tales From The Liaozhai Studio

Strange Tales from the Liaozhai Studio is one of the best collections and readers of classical Chinese fiction. Since the appearance of the book, different English translations came into existence one after another. However, in some versions, the three special sentence types remain undesirable, i.e., very short sentence, four-character sentence and stream sentence. This thesis intends to find out some concrete strategies and optimize the translation of them.Chapter One firstly assorts the function of the short sentences in the book. Short sentences are generally very short and simple, they have some important functions in the contexts, such as serving as a comma or full-stop, helping to create an exciting or intense situation or enrich the image of a person. In order to translate these sentences properly, we can make a translating brief to identify the purpose of our task with the reference of functionalist theory.Chapter Two describes some difficulties in translating the four-character sentences through some detailed analysis of the selected versions. If a translator wants to handle the four-character sentences well, he should pay attention to simplicity, modality and relativity, and especially its form. In this chapter, the thesis introduces the documentary translation method and the Venuti's theory of resistant translation strategy to help the analysis of the four character sentence translation..Chapter Three focuses on the stream sentence. This kind of sentences can be divided into two types: one has a few subjects; the other has several omitted ones. Usually, we treat them in different ways. The more complicated ones could be divided into some shorter sentences and the simpler and shorter ones could be dealt with in the way of four-character sentence to keep the style.In conclusion, according to the functionalist theory, translators should first of all fix the purpose of the task in order to select the most effective ways to deal with the three unique types of sentence.