STYLISTIC APPROACHES TO LITERARY TRANSLATION: WITH PARTICULAR REFERENCE TO ENGLISH-CHINESE AND CHINESE-ENGLISH TRANSLATION by XIAOCONG HUANG A thesis submitted to The University of Birmingham for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of English School of English, Drama and American and Canadian Studies The University of Birmingham November 2011 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. ABSTRACT This thesis reports a study applying stylistics in the analysis and assessment of literary translation, with specific reference to translations between English and Chinese. It focuses on how to maintain the original style in the translation – in terms of techniques or linguistic features in the literary texts and their correspondent functions – and on how to assess the style of the individual translation and translator as measured by quantitative data derived from corpus linguistic analyses. The thesis starts with an overview of the specific challenges of literary translation and the value of stylistics as an approach assisting in a better understanding of the literary texts, which shows the need for using stylistics in literary translation. It then illustrates how to apply stylistics in literary translation, taking the examples of central stylistic phenomena such as metaphor, free indirect speech, heteroglossia, repetition, and transitivity in the English translations of the celebrated Chinese novella《阿 Q 正传》(The True Story of Ah Q) (Lu Xun, 1921) and in the Chinese translations of the English short stories “Two Gallants” and “The Dead” (Joyce, 1914). I investigate the distinguishable “fingerprints” of the Chinese translators of the 《 阿 Q 正传》 through scrutinizing the data uncovered by corpus tools, taking into consideration each translator’s individual style alongside any detectable motivations pertaining to their personal experiences, the publishing context, and so on. This study argues that literary texts – as distinct from non-literary texts – have a real but hard- to-define “added value”, carried by the particular way in which they exploit lexis, grammar, and pragmatics; this added value is everything to do with the text’s style. A good literary translation must reproduce something of the source text’s style; otherwise the distinguishing literariness in the original will not be conveyed in the target text. Stylistic and corpus methods can help identify important stylistic features in the original, and can help us to evaluate whether equivalent features are or are not present in one or several translations of that original. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First, I would like to express my gratitude to my parents Huang Bangjun and Tian Enxiang, for their love, support, and courage for all my decades and especially for the six years when I was in the U.K. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor, Professor Michael Toolan for all the time he has dedicated to this thesis, his constant supervision, his helpful academic advice, and his kindness and patience. He, not only for his distinguished academic capacity but also his charming personality, was, is, and will be a role model of mine for life. I also thank the entire faculty in the Centre for English Language Studies and the Department of English of the University of Birmingham. With their help, I was able to know the world of English language more widely. I would like to show my appreciation to my husband Xia Fei, whose constant love and patience helped me through to the end. I also thank my brother Huang Zhao for his courage. I am also grateful to all my friends in Birmingham who offered ways through difficulties during these years. CONTENTS INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER ONE THE SPECIFIC CHALLENGES OF LITERARY TRANSLATION .. 9 1.1 Introduction ................................................................................................................... 9 1.2 Literary translation: criteria varying according to text type .......................................... 9 1.3 The uniqueness of literary translation ......................................................................... 13 1.4 The specific challenges of literary translation............................................................. 16 1.4.1 Literary language (poetic language) ................................................................. 16 1.4.2 The dominant structures of literary texts .......................................................... 22 1.4.3 Translation as an individual translator’s selections of the target language words ................................................................................................................................... 26 1.4.4 Target perspective: target language and culture, and target readers ................. 32 1.4.4.1 Target text: with linguistic and cultural differences from the source text ............................................................................................................................ 32 1.4.4.2 Target audiences ..................................................................................... 36 1.5 Critical thinking about general issues in literary translation ....................................... 39 1.5.1 Equivalence: can equivalence be achieved? ..................................................... 39 1.5.2 Accuracy and fidelity: Does accuracy or fidelity mean word-for-word translation? ................................................................................................................. 44 1.6 Conclusion ................................................................................................................... 51 CHAPTER TWO USING STYLISTICS IN THE ANALYSIS OF LITERARY TRANSLATION ..................................................................................................................... 54 2.1 Previous research on style and translation: an eclecticism of theoretical approaches 54 2.2 Stylistics: an approach assisting in a better understanding of literary texts ................ 56 2.2.1 Stylistics defined ............................................................................................... 56 2.2.2 Stylistics: a “rigorous” and systematic approach .............................................. 59 2.3 Illuminating research in Stylistic Approaches to Translation ..................................... 64 2.4 Lu Xun and James Joyce: masters of writerly craft .................................................... 69 2.4.1 Lu Xun’s The True Story of Ah Q: a venture in technique ............................... 69 2.4.2 James Joyce ....................................................................................................... 77 CHAPTER THREE METAPHOR, SYMBOLIZATION, AND TRANSLATION ......... 80 3.1 Introduction ................................................................................................................. 80 3.2 Interactional risks and rewards .................................................................................... 81 3.3 Traditional deviation theory about metaphor .............................................................. 83 3.4 Recent research about metaphor: Grice’s pragmatic aspect ........................................ 84 3.5 Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory .................................................................... 86 3.5.1 Metaphor as a process: “how” rather than “what” ............................................ 86 3.5.2 Insights from Relevance Theory into translating metaphor .............................. 90 3.5.2.1 The importance of context and target-oriented translation ..................... 90 3.5.2.2 Weak implicatures and target-oriented translation ................................. 94 3.5.2.3 Translation as an interpretive use of language and target-oriented translation ........................................................................................................... 95 3.6 Case study ................................................................................................................... 98 3.6.1 Cases of metaphors in The True Story of Ah Q and translations ...................... 98 3.6.2 Cases of symbols in “Two Gallants” and translations .................................... 107 3.7 Conclusion ................................................................................................................. 122 CHAPTER FOUR DISCOURSAL VARIETY AND TRANSLATION .......................... 125 4.1 Introduction ............................................................................................................... 125 4.2 Free Indirect Discourse ............................................................................................. 126 4.2.1 Features of FID ............................................................................................... 126 4.2.2 Functions and effects of FID .........................................................................