On The E-C Translation Process Of Foregrounded Language In English Fiction

Foregrounding, with the emphasis being on stylistic device to highlight literary specialtyby deviating language from the norm, creates thematic significance as well as aesthetic valuein literary works. Translators’ perception and comprehension of such special stylisticphenomenon play an essential part in rendering literary works with foregrounding devices.Traditional studies on literary translation have laid much emphasis on the productions oftranslation activities yet scarcely explored the cognitive mental moves of translators who arethe subjects in translation practice. In view of this, the study adopts the think-aloud methodnative to psychological researches to make an empirical investigation probing and depictingthe dynamic mental characteristics of the subjects while they translate foregrounded languagein English fiction into Chinese.The experiments invited the first-year postgraduate students of MTI from Faculty ofForeign Languages, Ningbo University, involving a pre-experiment by introspective methodand a main test employing think-aloud protocols. The pre-experiment aims to investigatetranslators’ stylistic sensibility and treatment towards foregrounded language at differentlevels and to screen participants needed in the further experiment with varied stylisticcompetences. The TAPs experiment collects the concurrent verbal reports of the selectedtranslators’ mental moves when they translate several discourses with foregrounding devices.The underlying translation strategies are extracted from the transcribed protocols and areapplied to code and label all the data. Integration of data-based quantitative and qualitativeanalyses yield the following major findings:(1) As shown in the pre-experiment, the stylistic sensibility of the participating subjectstowards foregrounded language in translation is relatively not strong. The more complexstructure the foregrounded language is embedded in, the less attention-capturing and morechallenging it is for the subjects when they are rendering such devices. (2) The TAPs experiment extracts31sub-strategies as indicators by scrutinizing theprotocols transcribed from the subjects’ verbalization. Meanwhile the study shows thatparticipants with stronger stylistic sensibility are more aware of foregrounded features andmore engaged in contextual reasoning and stylistic analyses. They are more accomplished inperceiving and correspondingly in rendering the foregrounding devices. Participants withweaker stylistic sensibility, on the other hand, are more inclined to depend on dictionarysearch for decision-making and are insufficient in both perception and rendering of theforegrounded characteristics as a result of their scarcity of stylistic consideration.(3) The study further categorizes the processing strategies into four aspects, involvinglinguistic, literary, inquiring and transferring aspects, examining the two groups’ differenttranslation endeavors. Statistics indicate that translators with stronger literary sensibility makefewer efforts at linguistic level but more endeavors in literary and stylistic judgment onforegrounding artistry. They more often seek translation solutions through contextualizing andlogic reasoning. Translators with weaker literary sensibility nevertheless lay more foci onlanguage-related endeavors and dictionary search but make minimal efforts at literary levellike appreciating, understanding and reproducing the foregrounding traits.Implications can be drawn from the major findings that translators’ stylistic sensibilityneeds to be well cultivated in literary translation teaching, especially in the text involvinglarge language unit of special literary features. All the translation strategies discovered andgathered in the TAPs experiment make up a relatively complete flowchart of translationprocedures, in which translation expertise can be extracted and translational competence canbe accordingly depicted.