| Jack London is a prolific American writer with quite a number of master-pieces left to the world.Abundant studies have been conducted on his life and his works.However,few researches have been done on the translations of his writings,and those on the translations of his short stories are even rarer to be found.This study,taking“To Build a Fire”,“The Law of Life”,and “Love of Life” for example,compares and discusses different translations of these Klondike short stories.Adopting Ungerer & Schmid's classification of iconicity,this thesis focuses on the translations of iconicity in these three stories.Four kinds of iconicity in this paper are the universal ones to be studied,including pictographic iconicity,phonological iconicity,sequencing iconicity,and quantitative iconicity.The reproductions of these iconic principles are crucial to the representation of the original vivid description,the reconstruction of similar literary effect,and the transfer of writer's intention.This paper finds out that,in the translations of “To Build a Fire”,“The Law of Life”,and “Love of Life”,the translation of iconicity plays an indispensable role in maintaining the vivid description of environment,plot,and character,among other aspects.First,in a microscopic view,hieroglyphic Chinese characters can to some extent reproduce pictographic and phonological icons,sometimes with the assistance of reduplication or repetition,as well as additional decorative words.This contributes to preserving the lively drawing of environment and character's actions.The translation of imagic iconicity projects the original scene for target readers.Second,on a syntactic level,translators are inclined to reproduce similar temporal,spatial,and logical sequencing iconicity in Chinese.The translation of iconic sequencing plays its role in transferring the development of stories and constructing the original background.It also lays extra stress on the cause or effect.Correspondent iconic sequencing in Chinese makes it easier for target readers to understand the original writer's intention.Moreover,quantitative iconicity in long sentences,short expressions,and repetitions are often ignored.The implication of amount,thinking or feelings of the character can be conveyed by iconic quantity,which should betranslated into Chinese sentences with similar length or repetitions to preserve the writer's intention and aesthetic effect.Therefore,the reproduction of iconicity exerts a great influence on the translations of these Klondike short stories.Hopefully,this can serve as a useful guide for the translation of Jack London's other works. |
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