On The English Translation Of Lu Xun’s Prose From The Perspective Of Functional Stylistic

Chinese modern prose, as one of the four primary literary genres, has assumedflourishing development since the May4th movement. With its rich material, shorttext and exquisite vivid emotion, it is a very important communication medium ofChinese culture into the world and occupies an important position in the world cultureexchange. With the improvement of Chinese culture influence, more and moreemphasis has been put on the relative researches of the modern prose, and manyfruitful studies about the prose translation have been made. This paper takes DawnBlossoms Plucked at Dusk as example and bases on the functional stylistic theory inorder to explore the ways of achieving the stylistic equivalence between the sourcetext and the target text and discusses its relevant translation methods and strategies. Itis hoped that a new perspective could be found for the LuXun’s prose translationstudy.Functional stylistic, as one of the most influential modern stylistic, has beenwidely applied in many fields, such as literature, teaching, and translation etc. It isfound that the correlative study in the translation field is still in the initial stage.Functional stylistics, with the creative interpretation of style and comprehensiveanalysis method, can provide complete understanding of the original language andguide the translation process effectively. This paper attempts to apply the functionalstylistic theory to guide the translation practice. It not only offers a new angle of view,but also enriches the applied research in the translation further.Dawn Blossoms Plucked at Dusk is originally called Old Story Retold, as theonly collection of recollection essays written by Lu Xun, it mainly portrays hischildhood and education experiences. Lu Xun not only describes his heartfeltreminiscence of hesternal close family members, friends and teachers, but alsopresents a social silhouette of the late Qing Dynasty. The early Republic of China andthe folklore of the era are drawn vividly. Because of the rich thought, concise diction,and full soakage of Chinese culture, this book occupies a very important position inprose study. The source text is translated into English by the well-known “dreamticket” translators Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang. They translate a large number ofclassic books, and introduce successfully China’s rich culture heritage to the Western world. Given the rich culture connotation and the unique stylistic features of this book,it is necessary to conduct an in-depth research on the translation.This paper is based upon the three meta-functions, multileveled and prominencetheory, compares and analyzes the stylistic features of the source text and the targettext. The ideational function is represented from lexis, syntax, semantic; theinterpersonal function from vocabulary, modality and mood; the rearrangement ofinformation units and cohesion are the two aspects in the textual function analysis.Through comparison and analysis, the main research results are listed as follows: inideational function, the prominent stylistic features in lexis level are culture-loadedwords. They include ecological culture-loaded words, material culture-loaded words,religious culture-loaded words, historical culture-loaded words, and customaryculture-loaded words. The translators adopt literal translation, transliteration,interpretation, substitution and supplement to represent its ideational meaning. Theprominent stylistic features in syntax level include: repetition, antithesis, parallel,slangs and quotation, the detail translation strategy the translators adopt is equivalencein content and correspondence in form. The prominent stylistic features in semanticlevel are represented by some rhetorical devices such as sarcasms, personification,simile, metaphor, and onomatopoeia. The translators also adopt correspondingrhetorical devices to represent its semantic features. The stylistic features of thedistinct characters’ personalities and their rich inner thoughts are represented by theinterpersonal function. Based on specific situational context, the translators choose thecorresponding words, mood and modality in the target text to represent the characters’status, attitude and evaluation words in the source text. In textual function, theprominent stylistic features include rearrangement of information units and cohesion.The translators rearrange those sentences whose surface structure are loose and casualin the source text, and make them become rigorous complex sentences, which is morein line with the target language stylistic features. From the above research, it can beconcluded that when the translators render this stylistic features, it is by no meansnecessary to follow closely to the original text. Rather, it is the thoroughcomprehension of stylistic features and intentional creation that help the translators toretain stylistic structures in the source text.Through comparison and analysis, this thesis compares the original text ZhaoHua Xi Shi and its translation version Dawn Blossoms Plucked at Dusk from theperspective of functional stylistic to prove this theory is very instructive as a guide fortranslation practice. The examples in the thesis which are cited from the text not only display the characteristics of the source text and the target text, but also demonstratethat functional stylistics is also valid and applicable to the analysis of the prosetranslation, which offers a new angle to understanding the prose translation and henceprovides references to later researches on prose translation and evaluation.