A Comparative Study Of Two Chinese Versions Of A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man From The Perspective Of Literary Stylistics

James Joyce is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest writer in20th century in Ireland. The most outstanding achievement he made is language experimentation and distinct language skills presented in his works. His semi-autobiographical masterpiece, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, represents his early creation which embraces a lot of modernist techniques.Guided by literary stylistics, an interdiscipline combining linguistic theory and literary criticism, this thesis aims to give a detailed check on the aesthetic and thematic purposes underlying the choice of language. It looks for a new perspective to apply this approach to literary translation criticism. It compares the two Chinese translations to see how much they retain the artistic effect and how literary stylistics guides the future translation study. This thesis studies stylistic features from four aspects:lexical categories, grammatical categories, figures of speech, and cohesion and context, holding that stylistic features on different levels serve for the thematic and artistic purposes and impact translators’choices in the translation process.In lexical aspect, Joyce employs plentiful adjectives to make vivid and lively description and makes nonce words to increase the aesthetic value and infill creativity into language. In grammatical aspect, an increasingly complicated wording and sentence structure has been seen in the text as with the hero’s growth in the novel. Flexibility in sentence structure can be treated as one key aspect of Joyce’s craftsmanship. As for the aspect of figurative of speech, metaphor, ambiguity, onomatopoeia and parallelism are explored to understand Joyce’s intention to increase literariness and strengthen stylistic effect. In aspect of cohesion and context, Joyce uses ellipsis, lexical repetition and elegant variation to compact the text together, keep the continuity of context and enforce the aesthetic effect. A comparison between the two Chinese translations finds out the role that the understanding of stylistic value and thematic meaning play in the translation is very essential to keep the aesthetic value and convey the source text in a comprehensive way. It also finds out that neglecting stylistic features may lead to a misunderstanding of the source text and a loss in the aesthetic and thematic value. This research provides a new perspective to explore the stylistic value in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and discuss translation strategies embodied through a comparison of the selected two versions. It is important to understand artistic purposes of the author of the novel and corresponding translation strategies.