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毕业论文网 > 毕业论文 > 文学教育类 > 英语 > 正文

文体学视角下《酒国》英译本研究毕业论文

 2022-06-28 23:29:59  

论文总字数:50648字

摘 要

《酒国》是首位中国籍诺贝尔文学奖得主莫言的一部讽刺小说,该作品旨在探索中国人与饮食的关系,描绘中国的官场生态,并抨击其腐败无度。小说由葛浩文翻译,中英文本都颇具研究价值,但以往相关研究并不充分。本文将从文体学角度出发,分析英译本的文体特征,从而研究译本在写作风格上是否与原著对等。本文聚焦于词汇和句法两个层面,通过对两个文本进行统计和抽样检查,探讨原著和译本的文体风格,对比和比较之后,可以初步判断探究葛浩文版本是否反映出了原文的风格。

根据本文研究,英译本与原著基本实现了文体风格对等。在词汇层面上,与原文略有不同,译文风格偏向严谨而非随意化、口语化;但另一方面,作者和译者均使用了大量生动的不同修辞手法,从而创造出同等的艺术效果。其次,在句法层面上,译者通过调整句子成分的顺序和结构,使之更贴合译入语特点,也使得译文更倾向于读者友好型;两文本都采用了大量平行句式和右置从句,起到了强调作用,基本实现了句法对等。

从文体学视角解读葛浩文的《酒国》英译本将有助于文学翻译研究,因其强调源文本与目标文本在文体风格上的相关性,非停留于形式或字面含义上;此外,文学文体学分析也会激励翻译工作者思考怎样高效地把中国当代文学作品向西方推介。本文同时对汉英翻译学习过程以及中国文学作品翻译实践过程中如何发挥文体学的重要作用提供了一些见解。

关键词:《酒国》 英译本 文体学 词汇 句法

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………………........i

Abstract (English)……...………………………………………………………………ii

Abstract (Chinese)…………………………………………………….......…………..iv

1. Introduction ……………………………...………………...….......................……...1

1.1 The Republic of Wine and its English version.........................................................1

1.2 Research purpose.....................................................................................................2

1.3 Layout of the paper..................................................................................................2

2. Literature review.........................................................................................................3

2.1 The definition of style.............................................................................................3

2.2 Study on style and stylistics....................................................................................3

2.3 Stylistics and translation..........................................................................................4

2.3.1 Translation studies from the perspective of stylistics in the West..................4

2.3.2 Translation studies from the perspective of stylistics in China......................5

3. Methodology.................................................................................................................6

3.1 Research questions..................................................................................................6

3.2 Research data and methodology..............................................................................6

3.2.1 Data................................................................................................................6

3.2.2 Analysis steps.................................................................................................7

4. Results and discussion.................................................................................................8

4.1 Results.....................................................................................................................8

4.1.1 Lexis...............................................................................................................8

4.1.1.1 Word types...........................................................................................8

4.1.1.2 Rhetorical devices...............................................................................9

4.1.2 Syntax.............................................................................................................9

4.1.2.1 Syntactical parallelism......................................................................9

4.1.2.2 Right-branching sentences..............................................................10

4.2 Discussion...........................................................................................................11

4.2.1 Lexis...........................................................................................................11

4.2.1.1 Word types.......................................................................................11

4.2.1.2 Rhetorical devices at lexical level...................................................12

4.2.2 Syntax.........................................................................................................13

4.2.2.1 Syntactical parallelism..................................................................13

4.2.2.2 Sequence of sentences...................................................................14

5. Conclusions................................................................................................................16

5.1 Major findings of the study...................................................................................16

5.2 Implications...........................................................................................................16

5.3 Limitations............................................................................................................17

References……………………………………………………………………………..18

1. Introduction

Guan Moye, born on 17 February 1955, better known by the pen name Mo Yan, is a Chinese novelist and short story writer. He has been referred to by Donald Morrison of U.S. news magazine TIME as "one of the most famous, oft-banned and widely pirated of all Chinese writers", and by Jim Leach as the Chinese answer to Franz Kafka or Joseph Heller. He is best known to Western readers for his 1987 novel Red Sorghum Clan, of which the Red Sorghum and Sorghum Wine volumes were later adapted for the film Red Sorghum. In 2012, Mo was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his work as a writer "who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary".

1.1 The Republic of Wine and its English version

The novel has two distinct narrative threads, one of a standard fiction form following a detective, and the other a series of letters between "Mo Yan" and an aspiring author, Li Yidou, who is a fan of his work. The book contains ten chapters, each chapter several parts. The "detective" thread follows a special investigator, Ding Gou'er, sent to rural China to investigate claims of cannibalism. The "letters" thread consists of letters exchanged between the ambitious writer, and "Mo Yan", as well as short stories that Li Yidou sends to "Mo Yan". As the novel progresses, the focus shifts from the Ding Gou'er standard narrative thread to the Li Yidou/Mo Yan one. Some characters appear in both threads.

Howard Goldblatt is a translator of numerous works of contemporary Chinese (mainland and Taiwan) fiction. He translated works of Mo Yan, including six of Mo Yan's novels and collections of stories. Goldblatt believes that The Republic of Wine is the most fanciful, complex, and abundant Chinese novel in terms of creation techniques.

1.2 Research purpose

This study is undertaken with the aim of exploring the stylistic features of The Republic of Wine, both in the original novel and the one translated by Howard Goldblatt, in order to judge whether the style of the English version accords with that of the original novel. Though it is not the best-known story created by Mo Yan, this novel has successfully imitated a variety of literature styles as detective, hallucinatory realistic, symbolistic, expressionistic, cruel realistic, lyric, structuralist, and swordsman stories. Past researches on this novel mainly focused on literary criticism; studies on its English translation are limited, let alone stylistic perspective. By discussing stylistic equivalence achieved bu Goldblatt, this thesis may further raise people’s awareness to apply stylistics concepts to translation. Besides, this research may inspire translators to take stylistics into consideration while working on literature works; therefore more excellent Chinese fictions would be known and accepted by readers abroad.

1.3 Layout of the Paper

This thesis consists of five chapters: introduction, literature review, methodology, results and discussion, and conclusion.

Chapter One serves as a panorama of the texts and this current study. It provides the research background, significance of the research, objectives of the research and the outline of the research. Chapter Two reviews the relevant studies on style and stylistics at home and abroad, especially regarding translation studies from the perspective of stylistics. Chapter Three describes the research methodology and addresses research questions, steps and methods. Chapter Four is the main part discussing the results of this study. Chapter Five summarizes the important and major findings and proposes implications of the present paper.

2. Literature review

2.1 The definition of style

Various scholars have set forth theories on style from different points of view. Irish writer and satirist Jonathan Swift once wrote in Letter to a Young Clergyman, “Proper words in proper places, make the true definition of a style” (Swift, 1720). His words point out that to express properly and felicitously is vital to convey the style of a writer or a piece of work. According to the English translator Theodore Savory, “Style is the essential characteristic of every piece of writing, the outcome of the writer’s personality and his emotions at the moment, and no single paragraph can be put together without revealing to some degree the nature of its author” (Savory, 1957).

2.2 Study on style and stylistics

Western study on style was originated from rhetoric in the times of ancient Greece and Roma and excellent philosophers like Socrates, Plato and Aristotle contributed a lot to it. However, it was in the 20th century that stylistics truly became systematic and scientific as modern linguistics gradually came into being. Having studied the style of oral discourse, Swedish linguist Bally (1865-1947) proposed stylistics as a distinct academic discipline. His Traitéde de Stylistique Francaise, published in 1909, serves as a prelude to western modern stylistics”(Liu, Zhu, 2006). German scholar L. Spitzer (1887-1960) accessed literary works from stylistic perspective. He put forward that the value of literature was embodied by language and examined the effects generated by language at different levels. Furthermore,Spitzer proposed a research method called “philological circle” which aims at the long fiction analysis. “He is often considered as ‘the father of literary stylistics’” (Dong, 2008). Stylistics developed at a slow speed before 1930s; still, the Russian formalists, the Prague school and the French structuralists devoted a lot to this discipline. In 1958, a conference held at Indiana University in the US serves as a milestone in the history of stylistics. Russian linguist and literary theorist Roman Jakobson (1896-1982) proposed that, “If there are some critics who still doubt the competence of linguistics to embrace the field of poetics, I privately believe that the poetic incompetence of some bigoted linguist has been mistaken for an inadequacy of the linguistic science itself. All of us here, however, definitely realize that a linguist deaf to the poetic function of language and a literary scholar indifferent of linguistic problem and unconversant with linguistic methods are equally flagrant anachronisms” (Jakobson, 1960). R. Jakobson stresses studies of literature from a linguistic angle, which introduces linguistic methods into literary research. English stylistician R. Carter and P. Simpson published a academic work Language, Discourse and Literature: An Introductory Reader in Discourse Stylistics, dividing the developmental history of modern stylistics into four stages: The first phase, from late 1950s to the end of the 1960s, is dominated by formalist stylistics; the second period is the 1970s when functionalist stylistics acquires its prosperity; the third one is the 1980s and discourse stylistics becomes popular; the last stage is the 1990s, socio-historical and socio-cultural stylistics flourishes in this era (Liu amp; Zhu, 2006). Stylistics has been further developing since the turn of this century, gaining popularity in a variety of educational institutions the world over. Narratives stylistics, cognitive stylistics, feminist stylistics and interdisciplinary study are gaining further development.

2.3 Stylistics and translation

2.3.1 Translation studies from the perspective of stylistics in the West

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