Defamiliarization And Translation

In the history of translation studies, attaching greater importance to content than form was once the mainstream trend, which resulted in the disappearance of some expressions with poetic value. However, the translation strategy of defamiliarization can help reveal the poetic value of literary works. From the perspective of poetics, the thesis compares Daphne du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn with its Chinese version, and explores the adoption of defamiliarizing translation strategy in order to arouse more attention to the formal beauty of the source language.The concept "defamiliarization" was firstly raised by Victor Shklovsky in1917. He claims that the existence of art is to make people perceive things instead of recognizing them, and the techniques of art aim to make objects strange, increase the complexity of forms and the difficulty of perception. New criticism holds that writers should employ defamiliarized language to prolong the reading process and endow readers with a new perspective when they read works of literature and art. The defamiliarization in translation is the extension of defamiliarization theory in the translation field. The essential idea of defamiliarizing translation strategy is that translators discover unfamiliar expressions and deliberately maintain them in the translated text in order to convey the unusual beauty to target readers.The thesis makes a comparative study of Daphne du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn and Wang Dongfeng’s Chinese version. The linguistic features of this novel mainly include the following aspects:du Maurier gives language to a full play and endows the language with a poetic beauty; she emphasizes the formal beauty of language despite the horrible plot; in Gothic novels form is actually a part of content. In Wang’s Chinese version, the translator adopts lots of defamiliarizing translation strategies to represent the formal charm of source language, reproducing the poetic beauty in Jamaica Inn from linguistic, rhetorical and cultural aspects.It is found that Wang’s defamiliarizing translation strategies are mainly embodied at linguistic, rhetorical and cultural levels. The linguistic level involves Wang’s artistic choice of words and novel arrangement of linguistic elements. Regarding rhetorical level, simile, metaphor and personification are expounded. The cultural level involves two aspects that are idiom and entertainment culture. During the translation process, the translator mainly uses the defamiliarizing strategy to make familiar elements novel and exotic.The thesis focuses on the translation strategy of defamiliarization, which is a backwash to the tendency of neglecting forms after the "Cultural Turn". Hopefully, translators would lay more emphasis on the retaining of poetic language rather than simply familiarize the novel forms. The concrete strategies may vary with the development of society, but translators shouldering the responsibility for cross-cultural exchange are obliged to apply defamiliarizing translation strategy to retain the poetic beauty of language. The stress on defamiliarizing translation strategy not only carries theoretical significance to research on translation ontology but also helps improve the practical translation abilities of translators.