A Study On Chinese Translation Of Rebecca Based On Image-G Actualization

Daphne du Maurier,a British female writer,is deeply influenced by Gothic novels.Most of her novels are mysterious and a little horrible with complex plots.Rebecca,as one of her most successful novels,has been a matter of great concern and of great literary value since its publication.It has also been adapted to a movie.In the novel,the heroine is dead at the beginning while her characteristics as well as her control over Manderley are embodied through other characters.The unique writing method,through which the living characters in the book are set as a foil to the dead one,the bewitching atmosphere and the complicated plots have attracted many translators to devote themselves to its translation.Rebecca has been translated into more than twenty kinds of languages at present.And there is more than one Chinese version.As to the Chinese title of Rebecca,it was originally translated into Lv Bei Ka(吕蓓卡)and later was changed into Hu Die Meng(蝴蝶梦).The Chinese translation by Lin Zhiling and Cheng De which was published in 1994 has been analyzed by many scholars from different perspectives,such as retranslation,misinterpretation,translation of titles.The word “gestalt”, which means “pattern” or “configuration”, originated from the field of psychology and later was applied in multiple areas. Mary Snell-Hornby proposed an idea that translation study should be an independent subject. Based on Gestalt theory, she also advocated the integrated approach to translation study. In recent years, studies on translating process and the translation itself are increasingly conducted on the basis of the concept “gestalt”. Starting from the Gestalt theory and based on translation practice, Professor Jiang Qiuxia published her monograph in2002, proposing the study perspective of gestalt image actualization in literary translation. The main ideas of the content include: the gestalt image, differing from the image in the traditional sense, refers to the image in a gestalt sense and is a sort of essence in literary texts; the gestalt image, resulting from the integration of individual images, has gestalt qualities, namely mood and contour, and successfulliterary translation depends on the perfect transference of gestalt qualities; two steps are needed based on the gestalt image actualization: mental actualization of image-G,namely, the comprehensive understanding and overall grasp of the source text and linguistic actualization of image-G, namely, the organization and diction of the target text.The thesis puts emphasis on the analysis of the atmosphere presented by the environment and of the characters created in the novel from the aspects of mental and linguistic actualization of image-G. It also pursues an overall measurement and grasp of the Chinese translation, which can in turn prove the successful actualization of image-G on both mental and linguistic levels. Based on the detailed analysis on lexical level, syntactical level and rhetorical level, the thesis concludes that the Chinese translation has almost achieved the reproduction of image-G. Besides,several translation methods used by the translators have also been summarized.