Effects Of Continuation Translation In Developing The Translation Style Of Children’s Literature

Children’s literature is written for children and owns its distinctive stylistic writing features.How to develop the style of the work often brings challenges to translators during the process of children’s literature translation.Liu(1990)pointed out that style can be identified by a series of markers.This study employs Liu’s translation style theory,focuses on formal and non-formal markers in the theory to analyze the development of translation style in children’s literature through the continuation translation.Continuation translation is a translation training method proposed by Wang(2016,2018)based on the xu-argument.It emphasizes the importance of continuation translation practices on the basis of observing the high-quality works in learning the translation strategies,techniques and stylistic features.This study examines how learner acquires the stylistic features of the high-quality translation to develop her own translation style through the continuation translation method.The research questions are: 1)Does the continuation translation help learner develop the translation style of children’s literature? 2)Is there any alignment effect in terms of translation style during the process of continuation translation? To what extent does this alignment manifest itself in the translation style?A graduate student in MTI was involved in this research.The study was divided into three stages: translation testing,continuation translation training,and re-translation.The first stage was translation testing.It required the participant to translate a story from Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince and Other Stories(without reference to the excellent translation).Following the translation,the script was submitted to three professionals in translation to rate the translation style of the participant through the use of formal and non-formal markers.The second stage consisted of four rounds of continuation translation training.The training materials included the original book of The Happy Prince and Other Stories and its translation by Ba Jin.It took the following steps in each round:(1)read the English text only and marked the expected difficult points to be translated;(2)read the parallel texts,studied the first two thirds of the original story with reference to the excellent translation,and analyzed its stylistic features;(3)translate the last one third of the story without reference to the excellent translation and attempted to imitate the excellent translation’s style.During the four rounds of training,any study related to the translation style was avoided.In addition,the participant kept process logs to document the learning,application and reflection of the translation style.The third stage was retranslation,during which the participant was instructed to randomly select a story from the training materials for retranslation(without reference to the excellent translation)and submitted the translation to the three professionals for rating again.The data analysis centered on two points: 1)compare the two scores of the translation test and re-translation to identify the effects of developing translation style through continuation translation;2)analyze the non-continued and continued translation and process logs,to explore the alignment effect in the translation style and the common problems while conducting continuation translation tasks.The research found the overall score of the retranslation was higher than that of the translation testing,indicating the continuation translation helped learner develop the translation style.In addition,the alignment effect between the learner’s translation and the high-quality translation was prominent in formal markers,while insufficient evidence of the alignment in the non-formal markers was found.The study manifests its value from both theoretical and practical aspects.Theoretically,this study confirmed the efficacy of the development of translation style through continuation translation,which not only expands the research of continuation translation,but also adds value for further development in the practice of continuation translation and the theory of xu-argument.Practically,this study found learner can develop a translation style through continuation translation and improve translation ability,opening a new way for the practice of developing translation style and contributing to the translation teaching research.