A Comparative Study Of The Two English Versions Of Miss Sophie’s Diary From The Perspective Of Literary Stylistics

Ding Ling’s representative work,Miss Sophie’s Diary,is a diaristic novel with distinctive language style.It vividly and truly depicts the complicated,delicate and contradictory love psychology of a small bourgeois intellectual woman during the May 4th movement,and depicts a female image that pursues individual freedom and love supremacy and rebellions against feudal ethics.Jenner’s version published by China Literature Press in 1985 and Barlow’s version published by Beacon Press in 1989 are the most influential translations in the English world.At present,there are few researches on these two versions,which only focus on the language use.There is no comparative study of the two English versions.As a discipline connecting linguistics and literary criticism,literary stylistics is concerned with how the author can express and strengthen the thematic meaning and aesthetic value of his works through the choice of language.It uses linguistic methods as tools to describe and interpret literary works.Applying literary stylistics to the study of English versions of modern Chinese novels will help us to better understand that different language choices will lead to different expressions,and to explore objectively whether the translation can reproduce the thematic meaning and aesthetic value of the source text.This is the reason why this paper uses literary stylistic theory to make a comparative study of the two English versions of Miss Sophie’s Diary.Based on the analysis of literary stylistics,this paper compares the differences between the two versions in terms of vocabulary,syntax,rhetoric,and context and cohesion.We discuss their representations of the thematic meaning and aesthetic value of the source text.This paper makes a comparative analysis of specific cases by means of close reading,and finds that the two English versions restore the content of the source text to a large extent.Besides,the two English versions have reached the aesthetic value similar to the source text,to a large extend and each of them has aesthetic representation.