A Study Of Defamiliarization Effects Of Lord Jim In Its Translations

Lord Jim, as one of the best-known novels of Joseph Conrad, a famous English Polish writer, is highly recognized in English literature, for its innovative writing skills, style creation and also attempts to transcend the hurdles of conventional novel modes. Despite its long history of introduction into China and quite a few versions in Chinese, studies on its translation seem to be rare, and even less ones on its language characteristics.One of the most remarkable language features in Lord Jim may lie in its defamiliarization effects, which means making objects unfamiliar, making forms difficult, increasing the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.Analysis of Conrad's defamiliarized language features will be beneficial for a better understanding of Conrad's works.In this novel, defamiliarization is embodied in lexical, syntactic and textual respects. Since the success of translation largely depends on how a translator views and deals with defamiliarization devices in the novel, this thesis is to discuss how to reconstruct the defamiliarization effects in translation in the above three respects.This thesis consists of three chapters. Chapter One, mainly concerned with the translation of defamiliarization at lexical level, analyses how to represent fresh collocations, which include lexical metaphor, nominalization and language hybrid. The translation of defamiliarization at syntactic level is discussed in Chapter Two, which dwells on two types of original syntactic forms:marked theme and unbalance of syntactic components.Chapter Three focuses on defamiliarization skills at textual level, namely black humorous jocosity, time freezing and shift of narrative perspectives.Through comparison of three Chinese versions, some translation strategies are summarized in the thesis.In order to represent these effects successfully, a translator shall try to imitate the original's rhetorical devices, ways of collocation, syntactic traits and ways of organizing texts by means of formal or functional likeness of source language and target language. Due to language differences, sometimes a translator needs to take compensatory measures.