Fictional Style Translation From The Perspective Of Stylistic Markers Theory

This report,based on the translation practice of Nancy Drew Series(22-23)—The Clue in the Crumbling Wall and The Mystery of the Tolling Bell,has explored the translation strategies and methods of the novel’s style from the perspective of the Stylistic Markers Theory.Nancy Drew Series,telling about Nancy Drew,a clever and brave teenager detective’s cracking of a chain of suspense mysteries,has been much-loved by teenage readers worldwide,since its publication in the 1930 s.The fiction,with suspenseful plots,distinctive characters,concise and vivid language,showcases the style of juvenile detective fiction.Reproducing its style is critical to the artistic quality in the source text,yet challenging for the translator.To solve the problem,the translator has adapted the Stylistic Markers Theory to guide the translation.Stylistic marker is the representation of the source text’s style used by readers and translators to identify and appraise the style faithfulness of the translated text.The translation of stylistic markers,consisting of formal markers and non-formal markers,hence became the focus of this report.Liu put forward three strategies,including corresponding,recasting and decolouring to handle the issue of style translation.The source text has five types of formal markers,including register markers,syntactic markers,lexical markers,textual markers,and markers of figure of speech,and two types of non-formal markers: ways of expression and the intrinsic quality of the work.Accordingly,this paper follows the guidance of the three style translation strategies to summarize the methods these markers in Nancy Drew Series.Finally,10 specific translation methods are summarized to realize the reproduction of style.The corresponding strategy(literal translation,addition,reduplication and sequential translation)is realized by four methods,and the recasting strategy(compensating,conversing and contextualization)and decolouring strategy(restituting,substituting and splitting.)are reflected by three methods respectively.