Functionality + Loyalty:A Case Study On The Translation Of Quartet In Autumn

Barbara Pym was an English novelist and was highly praised as "Jane Austen" of the twentieth century.Her lifetime generally fell into three periods.She wrote light comedies in the 1950s and they were all well received by both the critics and the public.But in 1963,her seventh work was rejected by the publisher,and then she experienced the long hiatus between 1963 and 1977,when she also suffered the misery of disease and retirement,etc.The last period began in 1977 when she was considered as "the most underrated writer of the 20th century" and her comeback novel,Quartet in Autunm,which has transformed its focus onto "spinsters",was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.Since then,Pym has attracted continuous attention from the critics and the public all over the world,and her life and work thus became the hub of their interest and research.In China,however,few people have realized the importance and contributions of Barbara Pym and the hidden value of her works.So far there is no translation of her works,even the widely known Quartet in Autumm.Since 1950s,the western translation theories basically developed with the linguistics.As a result,translation theorists were inclined to study translation from the perspective of linguistics.However,functionalist translation theory advanced in Germany in the 1970s and 1980s moved translation from a mainly linguistic phenomenon to being considered as an act of intercultural communication.There are four important scholars who have made great contributions to its development and evolution.They are Katharina Reiss and her text type model,Justa Holz-Manttari and her translatorial action model,Hans J.Vermeer and his skopos theory,as well as Christiane Nord and her translation-oriented text analysis.This paper is going to use Christiane Nord's model of text analysis to analyse the translation process and evaluate the quality of the translation product Quartet in Autumn.Specifically,it will first compare the ST-TT profiles in the translation commission,including the intended text functions;the addressees;the time and place of text reception;the medium;and the motive.Then it will pick out four elements from Nord's list of intralinguistic factors that are of particular relevance in the analysis of the present ST to discuss.They are content,presuppositions,lexis and sentence structure.Each of the them will be analysed in detail and elaborated with some examples from the translation of Quartet in Autumn.Since there is no translation work of this novel,this research is very innovative and meaningful.It is hoped to prove that Nord's model of text analysis can really help guide the translation of literary works,and at the same time draw people's attention to the old people and to call for more consideration to the elderly.