Black Humor In The English Translation Of The Golden Age

The style is the man. The style of a fiction is closely connected with itsauthor’s idiosyncrasy. Wang Xiaobo says in On Art of Fiction in The GoldenAge that “I think I was born with black humor. It is my idiosyncrasy”. TheGolden Age is the masterpiece of Wang Xiaobo and black humor is its style.Though some individuals are still suspicious of the translatability of style,most scholars contends that style is translatable and need to be reproduced. Iam in favor of the mainstream view, believing that style is not intangible, andit can be perceived, translated and reproduced.A lot of researches have been carried out on the original text of TheGolden Age and Wang Xiaobo. But few people pay attention to the Englishtranslation, especially to the translation of black humor in the target text.Given the facts above and based on the features of novels in terms of choiceof topic and characterization, this thesis analyzes the stylistic features ofblack humor in the original from the perspectives of formal markers andnon-formal markers by integrating Liu Miqing’s theory of stylistic markers.The formal markers focus on the micro-linguistic deviations includingregister markers, lexical markers, textual markers and markers of figures ofspeech, while the non-formal markers lay stress on the macro-literarystylistic features of the original in view of the choice of topic andcharacterization. The stylistic features are summarized. By comparing the source text with the target text, I find that the black humor is basicallycreated through the employment of three translation strategies which includemetaphrase, imitation and paraphrase.