Style Reproduction Of The Novel Where The Crawdads Sing

This report delves into the style reproduction of the excerpts(Chapter One to Chapter Seven)from Where the Crawdads Sing,a novel written by Delia Owens,an American wildlife scientist and writer.This book mainly tells the heroine's lonely growth story in the marsh.In this novel,the author adopts many special writing skills to build her unique style.These stylistic techniques are the difficulties of this translation practice and become the focus of this report.Delia Owens builds her natural,primitive,colloquial and elegant writing style through her special writing skills.First,at the lexical level,special wordings are used such as the words with hyphens.Such complex wording is one of the most ancient ways to build words and is out of date since English is increasingly becoming simple.Second,at the discourse level,dialects which are shown in word ellipsis and misspelled words are used in speech to build a natural and local style.Third,at the narrative level,there are many fragmented sentences with missing subjects which may be the first-person pronoun or the third-person pronoun since this story is told by the omniscient narrator who knows all facts,including the characters' psychology,while the writer is inconsistent in using the two pronouns to present the inner thoughts.Fourth,at the rhetorical level,many figures of speech such as simile,personification,metaphor and alliteration are used to increase the aesthetic effect of the original.Peter Newmark's semantic and communicative translation theory can be a good guide to the reproduction of these special writing skills.Semantic translation helps the translated text be closer to the original,including the style.Communicative translation helps the translated text be smoother and more fluent to the target readers.The good reproduction of style had better achieve the both: retaining the original style without causing obscurity to the target readers.