An Analysis Of Two Chinese Versions Of The Color Purple From Stylistic Translation

In recent years, the combination of stylistics and translation begin to attract people’s attention. Professor Shen Dan has made great achievements in this field, who has applied a new scientific evaluation method to study the fictional translation from stylistics. Besides, Halliday and Hasan divided cohesion into different categories, which also made contribution to the study of stylistics. In order to avoid the intuition and impressionism in studying literary texts, stylistics translation offers a less intuitive, less personal method to analyze the language of the text, thus more scientifically and systematically. Stylistic translation aims to seek the linguistic features that have stylistic functions contributing to the thematic significance and special aesthetic effects of literary works, describes and analyzes them with appropriate linguistic tools, and then illuminates their literary values.The Color Purple by Alice Walker the Afro-American writer exerted great influence since its publication and won her many Awards. Walker has inherited the excellent tradition of American black literature as well as has absorbed expressions in contemporary American fiction, both of which make The Color Purple a combination of virtues of the black literature. Moreover, it has broken through in the content and renovated in art. The Color Purple has become a millstone in American black literature. This thesis deepens the analysis of discourse level according to Halliday and Hasan’s modal of cohesion, which pushes the previous study forward with new material and broader analytical range.In this thesis, some prominent stylistic features in two Chinese versions by Yang Renjing (1986) and Tao Jie (1987) were chosen for the comparative study from the perspective of stylistics translation. And this thesis tries to contrast the two Chinese versions from the perspective of stylistic translation from three levels——lexical level, syntactic level and discourse level, which is helpful for deepening readers’ understanding and appreciation of the thematic meaning aesthetic value of Walker’s The Color Purple. The author of this paper does hope this thesis may server as a reference for further studies on Walker’s novel The Color Purple and its Chinese versions and on literary translation.