A Study On The Translation Of Tales Of Hulan River From The Perspective Of Foregrounding Theory

Nowadays,translation activity is no longer limited to the transmission of the meaning in the original text,and it is also concerned with the reproduction of the original style in the translation.The use of foregrounding languages is one of the ways to manifest writing style.Foregrounding language is a linguistic phenomenon that achieves a specific writing purpose by deviating from standard language or overregularity.Tales of Hulan River was once selected as "a hundred excellent Chinese literary works in one hundred years".The language in the novel is extremely artistic,and the extensive use of foregrounding language is the concrete embodiment of its high aesthetic value.Howard Goldblatt is keen on Hsiao Hung's works,and he has conducted in-depth research on Hsiao Hung's background and literatures.Moreover,Howard Goldblatt is the most renowned translator of Chinese literature in the English world.Therefore,his translation is of great research value.Based on the theory of "qualitative foregrounding" and "quantitative foregrounding"proposed by Leech,an English stylistics expert,this thesis compares Hsiao Hung's Tales of Hulan River and its English version,analyzing specifically how Goldblatt dealt with foregrounding languages in the translation process.The "qualitative foregrounding" proposed by Leech is mainly realized by eight deviation types,among which six types of typical examples in Tales of Hulan River are covered in this thesis,including lexical deviation,phonological deviation,semantic deviation,grammatical deviation,dialectical devication and registers deviation.In addition,"quantitative foregrounding" is realized by repetition and parallelism,and repetition can be categorized as phonological repetition,lexical repetition,syntactical repetition and paragraphic repetition.Foregrounding language carries writing intentions of authors,which is a non-negligible factor in the translation process.The primary task of foregrounding language translation is recognition.The three functions are the main basis of distinguishing foregrounding and prominence.After the comparison between the original text and its English version,it is concluded that Goldblatt mainly follows three principles in translating foregrounding language:the principle of functional equivalence,the principle of acceptability and the principle of aesthetical reproduction.Under the guidance of these principles,Goldblatt dealt with translatable and untranslatable foregrounding languages in different ways.For the translatable foregrounding language,he adopted strategies of literal translation and imitation to reproduce foregrounding effect in the English version.As for the untranslatable foregrounding language,he considered recreating the foregrounding effect at the first place.Firstly translated the original foregrounding language by free translation,and then created a new foregrounding form in the translation to achieve different foregrounding effect.As for the foregrounding phenomenon that neither can be dealt with by reservation nor recreating,the translator cannot but remove it,conveying the meaning through free translation while giving up the foregrounding form.In all,in the process of translation,translators should put style reproduction on the same position as meaning translation.Having a deep understanding of the author's writing intentions,and analyzing the specific function of foregrounding language,thus can reproduce foregrounding effects in the translation as far as possible.