A Comparative Study Of Language Style Translation In Lu Xun's Novels

For a long time,the issues of style and style translation of literary works have attracted much attention.In the realm of translation,discussions about style' definition,translatability and methods have never ceased.Style of literary works is a manifestation of writer's ingenuity,reflecting his peculiarities in linguistic performance and writing habits as well as spiritual temperament,thoughts and emotions.Therefore,style translation has already become an indispensible component in literary translation,and successful recognition and reproduction of style has gradually become a yardstick for the translation quality of literary works.Lu Hsun,one of Chinese greatest litterateur and ideologist,is the founder of Chinese modern literature.Among the large amount of literary works during he had created during his lifetime,his novels are the most prominent.Owning to the terse wording,profound thoughts and implicit meaning,his novels possess a distinctive style and have been translated into many languages and introduced all around the world.This thesis has chosen two most popular English versions for the research of style translation,one is Selected Stories of Lu Xun by Chinese famous translators Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang,the other one is Diary of a Madman and Other Stories by American research scholar William A Lyell.Firstly,with the introduction of historical development of stylistic theories,this thesis elucidates the origin of style as well as Chinese and overseas scholars' viewpoints about style at different historical times,confirming the importance of style in literary works.Then the necessity of language style translation and its translatability are affirmed through the discussion about the definition and translation of language style.After that,this thesis presents an overview of Lu Hsun's novels,including a brief introduction of Lu Hsun and his novel writings,and the characteristics of the language style of Lu Hsun's novels,which serves as the premise for this study.Based on Liu Miqing's theory of stylistic markers,this thesis makes a comparative analysis of both the formal markers and non-formal markers in Yangs' and Lyell's translated versions so as to find out the methods they had adopted to reproduce the original text's language style,the actual effects of them and the influencing factors for their method choice.In conclusion,during the translation of Lu Hsun's novels,Yang Xianyi mainly adopted the decolouring method,which enhanced the linguistic communicative functions of his translation and contributed to the reproduction of the concise and plain language style of Lu Hsun's novels.Lyell mainly employed the corresponding method and was used to translating out the implicit meaning,which is a violation of the profound style of Lu Hsun's novels.So this thesis came to the conclusion that Yang Xianyi's version did better in language style translation of Lu Hsun's novels.