A Comparative Study On The Two English Versions Of Lu Xun’s Complete Fiction From The Perspective Of Narratology

Lu Xun has been acclaimed Father of Chinese Modern Fiction. Despite the relativelysmall number, Lu Xun’s fiction is of conspicuous significance in Chinese modernliterature, first in distinctive subjects and profound thinking and second in artisticinnovation in narrative modes and techniques. Up till now altogether18scholars andtranslator home and abroad have translated Lu Xun’s stories from Chinese to English andpublished them, among whom only two has translated the complete fiction of Lu Xun---one is Yang Xianyi, the famous Chinese translator, and the other is a contemporaryEnglish Scholar Julia Lovell. And Julia Lovell’s The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Talesof China: The Complete Fiction of Lu Xun published in2009by is the most recenttranslation of the complete fiction of Lu Xun.Fiction, as a major form of literary genre, has its fundamental characteristic thatdistinguishes itself from poetry, prose etc. That is narrativity. Fictional translation shouldnot only reproduce the contents of original texts, but also endeavors to reproduce thenarrative features of the original texts. This thesis picks Yang Xianyi’s and Julia Lovell’sversions to make a comparative and descriptive study from the perspective ofNarratology. First it investigates the translator’ orientation between the source textimplied author and the target text real reader during translation through the comparison ofthe transferences of address terms and vulgar language. And then transference of speechand thought presentation is discussed to evaluate the reproduction of narrative effectsboth in Lovell’s version and Yang Xianyi’s version. At last, the author of this thesisanalyzes the narrative point of view adopted in Lu Xun’s short stories, and makes acomparative study on the transference of it.