A Study Of The Translation Of Narrative Mode Of Old Tales Retold From The Perspective Of Narrative Theory

Old Tales Retold is a collection of short stories based on Chinese old myths and historical stories. Through the rearrangement and the creative adaption of the elements as well as the alteration and the innovation of the narrative strategies, Lu Xun successfully brings the reality into consolidated historical texts to satirize the present.Narrative is essential to fiction, so the equivalence of narrative mode is crucial to the success of fiction translation. Especially for Old Tales Retold, the proper translation of narrative mode not only impacts the reproduction of the writer’s style and the unique aesthetic values of the book, but also influences the target readers’ understanding about this book. Based on the classic narrative theories, this thesis attempts to probe into the translation of narrative sequence, narrative perspective and speech presentation of Old Tales Retold in its English versions.There are two English versions of Old Tales Retold, translated by Julia Lovell and Yang Xianyi and his wife Gladys Tayler separately. This thesis adopts the Yangs’ version as the main source of case studies and Lovell’s version as the supplementary material. Through example analysis, this thesis explores the reconstruction of narrative mode of Old Tales Retold in its English versions, as well as the reading experience achieved. The author of this thesis holds that the Yangs’ version has reproduced the narrative mode of Old Tales Retold to a large extent. However, some improper translation still hinders the transmission of the information in the original text, for example, the non-equivalence of time duration breaks the narration rhythm in the original text and the improper translation of direct speeches weakens the expressiveness in the original text. By comparative analysis, this thesis explores different reading experience achieved by diversified narrative mode and the importance of narrative mode in translation is highlighted. A conclusion has been drawn that enough attention should be paid to the narrative mode in the source texts so that the task of translation can be better accomplished.