A Study On War Narrative Reframing In The Translation Of Zuozhuan From The Perspective Of Paul Ricoeur’s Narrative Theory

Zuozhuan is the first history book with a detailed narrative in chronological style in China.Its latest English version is co-translated by Stephen Durrant,Wai-yee Li and David Schaberg,published in 2016.This thesis attempts to study war narrative reframing in the translation of Zuozhuan from the perspective of Paul Ricoeur’s narrative theory.It mainly adopts the qualitative method to study the three battles between Jin and Chu in the co-translation of Zuozhuan by combining descriptive analysis and case study.And the three research questions will be explored: First,what efforts have the translators made in temporal-spatial construction of the war narrative in the stage of prefiguration?Second,what narrative changes of war stories have been made in translation under the temporal-spatial construction in the stage of configuration? Third,how have the translators represented character images of the war narrative in translation in the stage of refiguration?After the analysis,the thesis finds out that in the stage of prefiguration,the translators mainly constructed the war narrative of the Spring-Autumn Period from three aspects: construction of the temporal-spatial frame,restoration of historical background and emphasis on the cultural characteristics with the help of paratext.In the stage of configuration,narrative changes of war stories in translation are reflected in the intervention of narrative plot,explication of narrative time and reproduction of narrative point of view.In the stage of refiguration,the translators employed accurate words,punctuation conversion and flexible use of translation techniques like division,amplification,extension and so forth to display the distinctive character images in language description,action description,psychological and indirect description.This thesis analyzes the translation text based on Paul Ricoeur’s narrative theory,in the hope of enriching researches on the English translations of Zuozhuan and providing a reference for the translation and dissemination of Chinese literary works.