Reconstruction Of Misery Consciousness In English Translation Of Contemporary Chinese Children’s Literature

As an established theme in adult literature,misery is now appearing more and more often in children’s literature,highlighting the frustrations,tribulations and other unpleasant aspects of a child’s formative years.This new phenomena is worthy of in-depth discussion and research.In children’s formative years,they will experience both happiness and misery.Children’s literature needs to accurately reflect reality so that children readers can gain insight into real life and what can happen to them.In this way they will be better able to cope with these dilemmas and cultivate the correct misery consciousness.To discuss and evaluate these works as an aid to children’s development,it is therefore necessary to evaluate books which contain the misery theme.When translating these books attention must be paid to the misery theme contained in the original work and ensure that it is reflected in the translation accurately and in context so that more foreign readers will understand and appreciate the misery theme of Chinese children’s literature.This thesis,inspired by the theory of Eco-Translatology,tries to analyze the translation Eco-environment of Bronze and Sunflower,in order to provide an explanation for the translation choices that motivated the translator.Secondly,by analyzing the different translation strategies found in the English version and exploring the misery theme contained in the original text,this thesis explains the translator’ adaption and selection in the linguistic,cultural and communicative dimensions.It summarizes the effective strategies and shortcomings when translating different aspects of the misery narration.Major findings:(1)Firstly,in the linguistic dimension,reduplication and rhetorical devices are used on many occasions in the original work to make the language rhetorical,vivid and beautiful,and they also make the emotional expression of the characters stronger.In the English version,the translator made her adaption to the linguistic characteristics of the original work in the translation Eco-environment and used thesame or similar English semantic expressions or grammatical structures to reproduce reduplication and rhetorical devices.Secondly,direct speech is widely used in the characters’ language in the original work,which highlights a child’s strong and naive qualities in the face of miseries.However,the translator ignored children’s language and thinking patterns and changed sections of the direct speech into indirect speech,which weakened the naive and optimistic character of the children in the original text.(2)In the cultural dimension,the background of the misery in the original work includes many landscape descriptions,folk custom activities,people’s names,local food,etc.,which presents various aspects of people’s daily lives and creates a warm atmosphere in addition to the misery.In order to represent the historical cultural background of miseries in the original work’s translation Eco-environment,the translator retained the nouns appearing in a particular era by means of literal translation and transliteration.(3)In the communicative dimension,the parent-child interaction in the book shows a warm parent-child relationship in spite of the suffering.In addition,the descriptions of beautiful scenery in children’s eyes and nursery rhymes sung by the protagonists reflect children’s strong emotional expressions and firm positive attitudes in the face of miseries.In consideration of the target culture and the readers,the translator simplified the long paragraphs of landscape descriptions,and deleted or modified some parent-child interaction scenes,which weakened the optimistic,positive and indomitable image of children in miseries.