A Report On The Three Chinese Versions Of The Devil Wears Prada From The Perspective Of The Literary Stylistics

As a linking bridge between linguistics and literary criticism,literary stylistics has caught more attention from scholars in the field of literary criticism as well as literary translation studies. As literary stylistics can provide literary translation with analytical as well as critical insights, the present thesis, a translation project, aims at a comparative study of the three Chinese versions of the American novel The Devil Wears Prada from the perspective of literary stylistics. As to its humorous language, fluent narration and vivid description of the fashion industry, the novel has become a bestseller. So far, there are very few studies concerning such kind of popular novel, and this paper is going to apply the theory of literary stylistics to the study of its three Chinese versions, to examine the disparity between two Chinese students majoring in MTI and an experienced translator.The author read the Chinese version many years ago, so that’s probably the reason why there are few differences between author’s version and published version in content. In order to make sure the accuracy of the analysis, the author asks another MTI student who has never read the book to translate some distinctive parts and analyze these three versions from the perspective of literary stylistics. Although there are many differences between the two versions in various levels, this paper just studied register, omission, literal translation and free translation and sentence structure to see how the three translators dealt with the same source text with different approaches, thereby resulting in different translation effects, so as to explore the significance of literary stylistics towards fictional translation.