A Study On The English Translation Of Jie Mi From The Perspective Of Narratology

Mai Jia is a famous contemporary novelist and screenwriter in China.His novels have strange imagination and originality,their characters are dark and mysterious inside,and their stories are full of twists and turns and suspense.Most of his novels have been adapted for television and film.Jie Mi is one of his representative works.It was published in the 6th issue of the magazine “Dangdai Bimonthly” in 2002 and first published in October 2002.Translated by Olivia Milburn and Christopher Payne,its English version Decoded earned a huge success in the Western world and was later translated into more than 30 languages and published in more than 100 countries.The unique narrative style is a major feature of this novel,however,no scholars have done in-depth research on the translation of the narrative style of the novel up to now.From the perspective of narratology and based on Genette’s narrative theory,this paper attempts to make a comparative analysis of Jie Mi and its English translation from three aspects: narrative point of view,mode of speech and narrative level,as well as explores the presentation of the original narrative technique in the translated text and expounds the reasons for the variation of the translated text.It is found that the change of narrative point of view in the translation is mainly reflected in the change of zero focalization and internal focalization caused by the translators’ adjustment of narrative distance;the translation of mode of speech obviously tends to retain most of the dramatic reported speech and to transform narrated speech and transposed speech into dramatic reported speech;the leap of narrative level is manifested as the intrusion of translators’ consciousness and the purposeful metalepsis of the original text.There are three reasons for these variations:the translator’s improper control of the narrative distance and neglect of the narrative point of view;different language system between English and Chinese;the intrusion of translators’ subjective consciousness and values caused by translators’ subjectivity and reader identity.The purpose of this paper is to explore the narrative variation of the English version of Jie Mi and to expand and deepen people’s understanding of Decoded and the translation by Miburn and Payne.