Artistic Reproduction Of Language Style Deviation Of A Dictionary Of Maqiao In Its English Translation

Translation studies continue to take in nutrients from neighboring disciplines toextend their own research scope. Literary translation enjoys an intricate relationshipwith literary stylistics. Its combination with literary stylistics has broken new groundin the sphere of translation studies. Literary stylistics emphasizes the actual languagechoice by a particular author and analyzes the idiosyncratic linguistic expressions tohelp reflect the thematic significance and the aesthetic value. Current translationstudies on theory and practice especially the fictional translation seem to overstress thetranslation of the referential meaning with relatively much less attention to ordiscussion of the transference of those deviant artistic language forms embodying theoriginal thematic meaning and aesthetic functions. This will exert a great influence onthe translation quality of literary works as a whole. However, through an objective andsystematic analysis on those language deviations or foregrounding expressions inliterary discourse, literary stylistics can help to interpret the thematic significance orthe esthetic value and avoid the subjective and impressionistic criticism as well. Theintroduction of stylistics in literary translation studies could undoubtedly provide anextraordinary scientific approach for literary translation practice and is also efficient inavoiding subjective and intuitive criticism.Within the framework of literary stylistics, the present thesis sets out to conduct astylistic analysis on both the Chinese and English versions of Han Shaogong’smasterpiece A Dictionary of Maqiao. The novel is mostly characterized by its languagecreativity indicating the artistic language forms deviating from language norm whichconstitutes the uniqueness of its language style. As such, the present research aims togive special reference to such artistic forms with strong literariness as the languagestyle deviation, the foregrounding phenomena including their artistic reproduction inthe target language text. The research concentrates on the reproduction of styledeviation through adopting both a macro and a micro analysis on five levels, thephonological level, the lexical level, the syntactic level, the rhetoric level and thediscourse level. The author adopts the comparative analysis, qualitative approach andexemplification method to demonstrate whether the original deviant effect isfunctionally equivalent and the holistic language style is well retained or representedin the target language text.The present thesis concludes that the combination of literary stylistics andtranslation studies serves a pragmatic function in guiding the transference of the language style deviation of this novel. The deviant language features, the originalthematic meaning and the aesthetic value or the literariness are faithfully representedin the target text. Meanwhile, the present research has summarized some principalrendering strategies in reproducing the original stylistic deviation including literaltranslating, dynamic simulation, analogous translating and recasting and has set forthbasic principles in terms of the representation of stylistic deviation, namely,acceptability and functional equivalence so as to give some reference to literarytranslation practice. Finally, the present thesis points out that the study on the artisticreproduction of language style deviation in contemporary fictions is worth furtherexploring and studying.