| Er Ma, based on Lao She’s rich and real experience during his tour in England, was the only work of him in which the protagonists are placed in a totally unfamiliar foreign environment, making a living abroad. As one of Lao She’s representative works in his early stage, Er Ma has been translated into multiple versions since its publication, gaining much popularity at home and abroad. In this novel, Lao She extends his strong fustigation and accusation against imperialistic countries’ arrogance and prejudice towards weak nations. Also,profound excavation and painful reflections are made on the Chinese national incorrigibility.The use of art of irony is one of the most prominent narrative characteristics in Er Ma. The injection of ironic features in this novel makes its theme more striking and the character personalities more appealing. However, it is of great difficulty for translators to authentically deal with the transference of irony utterances in the text without diverging from the original context. There have been four English versions emerging successively after Er Ma’s publication.Nevertheless, little research has been conducted on its translated versions, let alone any studies on the irony art in it. As one of the major theories in the sphere of psychology, gestalt theory is regarded as casting a positive guiding significance for translation studies.Here, taking the four important rules of Gestalt Psychological Aesthetics as the theoretical basis and the two English versions of Er Ma (Kenny K. Huang(1984) and William Dolby(2013)) as the research objects, the author tries to make a comparative study on irony translation of the two accessible versions, thereby revealing the specific difficulties translators encountered in irony translation process, and then probe into the corresponding translation strategies and handling methods adopted by translators based on their full understanding of the writing intention and writing techniques of the original text. That is to say, to authentically and fully express the artistic effect of the source text in the translated version, what strategies were resorted to. This thesis aims to verify the applicability of Gestalt Psychological Aesthetics in translation and provides a new perspective to the evaluation of translation quality within the framework of Gestalt Psychological Aesthetics. Through the comparative analysis, the author eventually finds that both the two versions have their advantages and disadvantages in irony utterance translation. Besides, being guided by the Gestalt laws of Conformity and Salience is of vital importance in the manifestation of the characters and theme in irony translation, while being guided by the laws of Continuity and Heterogeneous Isomorphism is of vital significance in smoothly and faithfully reflecting the content of original text as well as the feelings and emotions of the writer in irony translation. This thesis ultimately verifies the guiding significance of gestalt psychological aesthetics theory on irony translation in literary works. |
