A Study On The Chinese Translations Of The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd Based On Berman’s “Negative Analytic” Theory

Agatha Christie is an English detective fiction writer as well as a pioneer in the“Golden Age” of detective fiction history.In her lifetime,she wrote eighty detective fictions totally,The Murder of Roger Ackroyd being the one well received because of its unique internal perspective for criminal case description and its application of the first person.After painstaking investigation into every detail of the case,detective Poirot found,to his surprise,that the narrator Sheppard himself was,in fact,the murderer.This pioneering narrative technique applied in the novel calls for additional endeavor and special attention when the novel was translated into other languages.Antoine Berman,a French translation theorist,considers that textual deformations tend to efface foreignness of original fictions.Translators have to analyze textual deformations and avoided moderately before they start translating.Berman termed the analysis on deformation as “negative analytic” and identified 12 categories of deforming tendencies.Few researchers conducted research on the translation of detective fictions from “negative analytic” perspective.The present thesis takes Berman’s “negative analytic” as its theoretical framework and Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd,as well as its 3 Chinese versions as its subject matters for research.The thesis identified the deforming tendencies as observed in the Chinese versions,including the tendencies at lexical,syntactic and textual level,explained why those deformations mattered in the Chinese versions,and which approaches adopted by the translators in their translating,in the hope of offering inspiration for translating literature works with similar features.Translations reflect different translation strategies influenced by the deforming tendencies.The present study showed that deformation tendencies seemed to determine translator’s strategies for translating.Translation deformations at the lexical level included clarification,expansion,qualitative impoverishment,and the destruction of expressions and idioms.Translation deformations at the syntactic level included rationalization and the destruction of vernacular networks or their exoticization.Translation deformation at the textual level included the destruction of linguistic patterns and the effacement of superimposition of languages.Berman’s “negative analytic” could help translators choose a flexible way of deformation while remain faithful to the original in either thematic meaning or aesthetic effect.