A Report On The Translation Of Three English Short Stories From The Perspective Of Narratology

As is known to all,fiction,poetry,prose and drama are known as the four major literary genres.Among them,fiction is a very important literary form.Through the development of the story,the shaping of the characters and the rendering of the story environment,the novel expresses the sincere feelings of the heart,reveals the thought-provoking social significance and enlightens the readers.As an important part of the novel,the short story is regarded as the art of knowing from a humble point of view by arranging the structure of the short story reasonably and expressing its profound connotation in a very limited space.Therefore,the narrative art contained in short stories is of great importance and worthy of further investigation not only in literary criticism but also in literary translation of short stories.This is exactly the case with the three short stories discussed in this report.Through their unique narrative skills and writing style,the writers of the concerned short stories tell complete stories and depict distinct characters in a short space.This report finds that in the process of translating English short stories into Chinese,if the translator simply understands the literal meaning of the original text,makes clear the development of the plot,and presents the story to the reader from the perspective of language transformation,the resulting translation cannot faithfully present the narrative art of the original text.This is because when the translator does not understand the narrative style and skills of the original text,there will be unequal responses between the target language readers and the source language readers.In the theory of classical narratology,narrative focalizations and narrative discourse presentation provide a new perspective for the study of short story translation,which is very helpful for translators to understand and analyze the narrative style of the original text,so as to faithfully present the narrative style of the original text in the translation.This report mainly discusses the translation of such three English short stories as “Lilac,” “The Mockingbird” and “Skeleton Lake: An Episode in Camp”.These three English short stories all contain different narrative focalizations and discourse presentation,which is of great literary value.After exploring the narrative theory,this report analyzes the translation of three English short stories from the perspectives of narrative focalizations of Genette and narrative discourse presentation of Leech and Short.And it also analyzes whether the translated version reproduces the narrative features and the thematic significance of the original text,and summarizes the translation techniques of narrative short stories,so as to provide new ideas and reference value for future English-Chinese translation of short stories.