On The Recreation Of Some Characters’ Gestalt Image In The Chinese Translation Of Fall On Your Knees

Successful novel translation lies in successful recreation of characters in the targettext. And successful character recreation lies in the overall appreciation and grasp of thecharacter in the source text, and recreating the character with vivid and artistic literarylanguage. This study attempts to probe into the problems on the recreation of characterimage from the perspective of Gestalt psychology and image-G actualization theory,aiming at providing theoretical guidance and feasible methods on the dealing of overallgrasp of the character image and its details, especially on diction, broadening theapplication of Gestalt psychology in translation field.Firstly, this study applies the holism principle and closure principle and image-Gactualization theory into the study of the character image translation process, puttingforward that the character image in literary works is actually a character image-G. Basedon image-G actualization theory, this study analyzes the actualization process of characterimage-G in three stages: stage one: gestalt perception of the original character image-G;stage two: mental formation of character image-G schema; stage three: verbal actualizationof character image-G schema. Based on these theoretical analysis, this study analyzes thekey words and phrases collected from four descriptions, namely portrait description,language description, action description and psychological description, of the twocharacters, James and Frances, of the novel Fall on Your Knees and its Chinese version.Through the above discussion and analysis, we come to the following conclusions:First, the character image-G as a whole could help in guiding and constraining thediction on character image recreation effectively.Second, impropriate diction would influence or even destroy the recreation of thewhole character image. Therefore, the harmony of parts and whole and the parts serving for the whole should be kept as a main translation principle in the translators’ mind toreduce or avoid the harm caused by impropriate diction.Third, on diction of the two characters, the translator adopts adjustment method,supplementary method and liberal method, creates two vivid characters, being faithful tothe original text and free from the constraint of the word form as well.