A Study On Retranslation Of Captains Courageous From The Perspective Of Literary Stylistics

The retranslation of classic literary works is a quite common phenomenon. The constant retranslations of literary works make them gain new vitality, which is worth appreciating. In recent years, the studies about the works of Noble Prize in Literature winners have gradually increased. The same is true of the retranslation of their works.Rudyard Kipling was not only the first British winner of Noble Prize in Literature but also the youngest winner, who has made great contribution to the literary world. His works last forever. Captains Courageous is one of Kipling’s representative works,which has been constantly retranslated. This provides materials to testify the validity of Retranslation Hypothesis.This thesis probes the retranslation of Captains Courageous from the perspective of literary stylistics and analyzes its three Chinese versions to see the efforts the translator has made in preserving and representing the stylistic features of the source text. Then the validity of the Retranslation Hypothesis is testified. Retranslation Hypothesis claims that the latest translation is much closer to the source text than the first translation or previous translations. This thesis is divided into five chapters.Chapter One introduces the purpose of research, research questions, research method and structure of the thesis. Chapter Two makes a review about retranslation,Retranslation Hypothesis and retranslation of Captains Courageous. Chapter Three provides the theoretical framework of stylistics and makes a combination of stylistics and the closeness to testify whether the Chinese versions is close to the source text,which lays a firm foundation for this thesis. Chapter Four is the main part. The author makes comparative analysis from the micro level: the lexical level, figurative level and semantic level. As for representing the stylistic features of source text, the author finds that in this case study, on the whole, the latest version(Wu’s version) is much closer to the source text at lexical level and figurative level. The first translation(Hu& Hou’s version) and the mid-term(Xu & Wang’s version) one are almost the same at the lexical level, but at figurative level, in terms of rhyme, the first translation is closer to the source text. At the semantic level, the first translation is closer to the source text than other two versions, which is followed by the latest translation. This proves that Retranslation Hypothesis doesn’t fully get its validity in this thesis.