| With his unique writing style,Dickens used a great quantity of foregrounded language in his magnum opus Oliver Twist.As one of the most important concepts in stylistics,foregrounding is often applied to studies on the reproduction of the style of literary works.For literary translation to be literary,the foregrounding effects in the source text must be reproduced as much as possible.In light of that,this thesis takes the theory of foregrounding as the theoretical framework to analyze whether and how the two translators,He Wen’an and Rong Rude,reproduced the foregrounding features from two aspects: deviation and over-regularity and seeks to answer three questions.What types of deviation and over-regularity did Dickens use in Oliver Twist? How did the translators handle the deviation and over-regularity and whose version is better?How can the target texts be improved if the translators failed to reproduce the original foregrounding effects?Through detailed text analysis,this thesis found that there are four types of deviation,namely phonological,graphological,grammatical and semantic deviation and two types of over-regularity,namely syntactic and semantic over-regularity in Oliver Twist.Mainly four translation methods were used to handle them: literal translation,free translation,zero translation and omission.In general,He Wen’an did better in handling foregrounding than Rong Rude,but both failed to reproduce the foregrounding effects in many cases.This thesis also found that many of the lost foregrounding features could be reproduced through compensation.Through analyzing and comparing the reproduction of foregrounded language of Oliver Twist,this study seeks to draw translators’ attention to the foregrounded language in Dickens’ works when doing translation and offer a new perspective for future research on the translation of Dickens’ works. |
