On The Translation Of Ambiguous Expressions In English Literary Works

Ambiguity is a common literary phenomenon in English literary works.However,understanding this complicated phenomenon is really a difficult task,let alone reproducing it in the literary translation.Besides,literariness is also an important standard to judge the quality of a literary translation.The preservation of ambiguity has great influence on the achievement of literariness in the translation.By now,there have been few studies on the translation of ambiguous expressions in literary works.Therefore,the thesis author takes it as the topic,uses her E-C translation of Graham Swift's Ever After and divides ambiguous expressions of this book into five categories,namely ambiguity of incomprehension,ambiguity of reference,ambiguity of sense,ambiguity of referent and ambiguity of inconsistency.And she presents comparative case studies with commentary to analyze how to maintain the ambiguity of the ST and achieve literariness in the translation of literary works.Based on this research,the thesis author draws her conclusions as below:when dealing with ambiguity of incomprehension and ambiguity of referent,she prefers to use the ambiguity of "Ambiguity" to restore the language style of the ST;when facing ambiguity of reference,it is better to be TL-oriented;ambiguity of sense always means a word has multiple meanings.Sometimes,translators have to compromise in their translations and try their best to present the most significant sense of the word;and when dealing with ambiguity of inconsistency,translators should use various techniques in accordance with the context,content and themes of the literary works.But all in all,they have to get close to the language style of the book author and maintain the ambiguity of the ST.On the other hand,the preservation of ambiguity helps translators to effectively achieve literariness in their translations and leave imagination to their readers.She believes that this research will give some enlightenment to the future researches on the translation of ambiguous expressions in English literary works.