A Translation Critique Of The Moon Opera: Text, Style And The Translators’ Choices

Qingyi is one of the masterpieces of Chinese contemporary writer Bi Feiyu, andby the profound themes and distinctive characters, it develops unique stylistic features.Translated by Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-Chun Lin, Qingyi’s English version(entitled “The Moon Opera”) has gained a great reputation overseas with its correctreproduction of the stylistic features of the original text. Relatively speaking, so farstylistic researches on this translation are still obviously insufficient.Stylistic significance (aesthetic significance and thematic significance) is one ofthe essential elements of literature works as well as the fundamental pursuit ofliterature translation. To this point, whether the target text reproduces stylistic featuresof the original text properly and felicitously is proved to be the major evaluativecriteria of literary translation criticism. In consideration of the foregoing reasons, bymeans of stylistic analytical methods, the thesis takes the English translation ofQingyi as its research subject, which is established in the literature text as well asprevents the analysis from being subjective.The thesis analyzed the translation from its reproduction of lexical connotation,syntactic structure, rhetoric devices and repeated patterns in the discourse, discussingthe translators’ compensation strategy and the reasons for their choices in reproducingthe stylistic significance of the original text. The study shows that the translatorsconsider the reproduction of the original stylistic features as an important issue. Indealing with the stylistic non-equivalence, the aesthetic significance becomes a priority in general in their translation. Nonetheless, due to the translators’ theory of“serving for the target readers”, to some extent, the thematic significance especiallyconcerning the historical and ideological sphere is relatively weakened and lost in thetarget text.