从文学文体学角度对_卖花女_两个中译本的比较研究

Acknowledgements
I would like to take this opportunity to express my heartfelt gratitude to all those who have offered me help and support in my preparation of this thesis.
My deepest gratitude first goes to my supervisor, Professor Shen Suqin, who has given me, in the course of my writing this thesis, invaluable suggestions and detailed advice from choice of the topic to the final draft of this thesis with her wide knowledge and deep understanding of language and translation. But for her valuable advice, constructive suggestion and warmhearted encouragement, completion of this thesis would be impossible.
My heartfelt appreciation also goes to all the teachers and working staff in the College of Foreign Languages, especially Professor Yao Hong, Professor Zhu Wen Jun, whose excellent teaching and scholarly character make me well grounded in my three years postgraduate study.
I would also give my heartfelt thank to my dear parents and my boyfriend Wang Zhiqiang who encourage me with their love and support.
Last but not least, I would like to thank all my friends and classmates during my postgraduate study whose help and encouraging inspired me so much. Those who spend their precious time in reading this thesis are also deeply appreciated.
文学文体学作为连接语言学与文学批评的重要桥梁，在文学批评，文学翻译等领域正在引起越来越多的学者的关注。

鉴于文学文体学在翻译研究，尤其是文学翻译研究方面的特殊分析和批评的视角，本文从文学文体学出发对英国著名剧作家萧伯纳的名剧《卖花女》的两个中文译本进行比较研究。

《卖花女》在中国广受欢迎，但是目前为止很少有对其译本的研究，因此有必要将文学文体学的分析方法应用到对该剧本的两个中译本，翻译大家林语堂和杨宪益的译本进行比较研究以分析不同译者对同一文本所做的翻译处理，以及译者对原文本身文体特征的关注程度所带来的不同的翻译效果。

本文主要从英国文体学家利奇（Leech）和肖特（Short）的文体学分析方法出发来关注原文本和译文的不同文体特点。

本文的第一部分对研究目的，研究范围，研究的可行性等几方面进行了分析。

第二部分的文献综述部分对《卖花女》的两个中译本的研究情况以及文学文体学在翻译研究，尤其在是文学翻译研究领域所取得的成就进行了回顾和总结。

第三部分是本文的理论框架部分，对于利奇和肖特的研究方法进行了全面的分析介绍，并对文学文体学中的重要概念进行了阐述。

第四部分是本文的文本分析部分，从词汇表达，句法结构，修辞特征，语境和衔接四个方面出发来分析不同译者对同一文本的不同处理结果，以及这些处理所产生的文体效果。

最后，本文总结了文学文体学在文学翻译的评价和译本分析方面的重要作用，并希望文学文体学不仅仅是评价文学翻译效果的有利工具，而且成为译者在进行其翻译活动的过程中慎重考虑的一个环节，真正做到形式与内容的同一。

关键词： 文学文体学《卖花女》比较研究
As a discipline mediating between linguistics and literary criticisms, literary stylistics has caught more attention in recent years from scholars in the area of literary criticism as well as literary translation studies. As literary stylistics can provide translation studies in general and literary translation in particular with analytical as well as critical insights, the present thesis aims at a comparative study of the two Chinese versions of George Bernard Shaw’s renowned drama Pygmalion from the perspective of literary stylistics. Despite the popularity of the play in China, so far there are very few studies concerning the Chinese translation of the play, and it is worthwhile to apply the theory of literary stylistics to the study of its two Chinese versions, by Lin Yutang and Yang Xianyi respectively, to evaluate the effects of the two different translators’ endeavors. This thesis mainly focuses on analyses of different stylistic features of both source text and target text based on the checklist provided by Leech and Short (1981). According to their framework, detailed comparative studies in the four aspects of lexical expression, syntactical structure, figures of speech, and context and cohesion are carried out on the dramatic text Pygmalion to see how the two translators dealt with the same source text with different approaches, thereby resulting in different translation effects. The study serves as a good illustration of the feasibility of literary stylistics in criticizing and evaluating translation quality. This thesis, after a systematic analysis of the different stylistic effects due to the different linguistic features, concludes that literary stylistics is not only a helpful tool in assessing translated literary works, but also a major consideration of translators in their literary translation.
Key words: literary stylistics Pygmalion comparative study
Contents
Acknowledgements (i)
摘要 (ii)
Abstract......................................................................................................................i ii
1. Introduction (1)
1. 1 Aim of the study (1)
1. 2 Scope of the study (1)
1. 3 Feasibility of the study ................................................... (2)
1. 4 Structure of the thesis (4)
2. Literature Review (5)
2. 1 Studies concerning literary stylistics and translation studies (6)
2. 2 Studies concerning translations of Shaw’s Pygmalion (7)
3. Literary Stylistics as the Theoretical Framework for the Analysis of the Two
Chinese Versions of Pygmalion (10)
3. 1 Checklist by Leech and Short (12)
3. 2 Important concepts in literary stylistics (13)
4. Analysis of the Two Chinese Versions of Pygmalion (17)
4.1 Aspects of Lexical Expression (18)
4. 1. 1 Nouns (18)
4. 1. 2 Verbs (21)
4. 1. 3 Adjectives (26)
4. 2 Aspects of syntax (26)
4. 2. 1 Sentence complexity (26)
4. 2. 2 Juxtaposition (27)
4. 3 Aspects of figures of speech (29)
4. 3. 1 Tropes (29)
4. 3. 2 Phonological schemes (31)
4. 3. 3 Grammatical and lexical schemes (35)
4. 4 Aspects of context and cohesion (37)
4. 4. 1 Cohesion (37)
4. 4. 2 Context (40)
5. Conclusion (45)
References (47)
1 Introduction
1.1 Aim of the study
The present thesis aims at a comparative study of the two Chinese versions of George Bernard Shaw’s renowned drama Pygmalion from the perspective of literary stylistics. As a discipline mediating between linguistics and literary criticism, literary stylistics aims at deepening our understanding and appreciation of literary works by analyzing their formal features and searching for their literary significance. In many literary texts, the writers’ manipulation of linguistic forms has its own purposes of achieving various thematic as well as esthetic effects and deepening and reinforcing themes of the texts. Literature is the art of language, and so is literary translation. The importance of analyzing the stylistic features of the literary text also decides that when doing literary translation, the translators should try their best to reproduce the style of the source text), and try to make the readers feel that they are reading the original writer’s words not the translator’s. Neglecting the subtle stylistic features of literary texts, the translator often fails to catch the literariness of the original texts. The present thesis takes literary stylistics as the framework to analyze translation of the stylistic features of the literary text from source text to target text.
1.2 Scope of the study
As a study of style in written and spoken language, stylistics accounts for the specific language style of certain authors or certain schools of authors. In its broadest sense stylistics can be applied to the study of both spoken languages and written ones, both literary works such as prose fiction, poetry, drama and non-literary varieties of language such as news, legal writings, advertisements, scientific and technological writings, religious writings, etc, but by its tradition, stylistics is more closely related to the analysis of the written literary texts. So, firstly the theoretical framework of the present thesis is narrowed down to literary stylistics to analyze a kind of written literary texts. Among different schools of literary critics, the analyzing methods of Leech and Short
1
(1981/2001:75) are taken as the theoretical framework of the present thesis. In their methods of analysis, Leech and Short give a complete checklist of linguistic and stylistic categories.
Literary texts can also be categorized into different genres such as poetry, fiction and drama, etc. Among these literary genres, poetry is a field in which literary stylistics has done more research work than in other literary genres, as poetry contains more highly deviant features. On the contrary, drama is the field which has attracted least attention compared to others, because of the complicated dual features of drama both being treated as the reading literature and being put on to the stage. Little research work has been done in the translation study of dramatic texts, especially from the perspective of literary stylistics. So the present thesis concentrates on the translation of dramatic texts and excludes other literary genres. For the reason of the space limitation as well as the author’s capability, not all of the dramatic texts are taken into account but Shaw’s play Pygmalion is taken as a case study. As a literary text, Pygmalion shares the common features of literary works, and as a drama, it also has peculiar stylistic features of drama language. From the comparative study of the two translated versions of Pygmalion, one by Lin Yutang and the other by Yang Xianyi, we can see the importance of doing stylistic analysis before translation and during the translation process by checking whether the translated versions have followed the original stylistic and linguistic features of the original text.
In summary, this thesis studies the two Chinese versions of the dramatic text Pygmalion from the perspective of literary stylistics.
1.3 Feasibility of the study
One of the reasons for applying literary stylistics to the translation of literary texts, especially to the translation of drama texts is that traditional translation studies are insufficient when applied to the translation of literary texts. During the past decades, developments in the fields of transformational grammar, contrastive linguistics, semantics, information theory, semiotics, psychology and discourse analysis, etc. have exerted great
influence on translation theories and criticism, enabling the discipline to broaden the areas of investigation and to offer fresh insights into correspondence or transference between linguistic and cultural systems. Developments in general translation studies are no doubt of relevance to a literary translator. But the general translation studies which usually operates on the level of linguistic correspondence does not deal with problems characteristic of literary discourse. One such problem is how to make the appropriate choice from grammatically correct “referential equivalents” or “stylistic variants” taking on different values or effects that tend to go unnoticed in ordinary discourse. The choice of a stylistically-optimal correspondent depends primarily on the understanding of the nature and function of literary text (Shen, 1995/1998: 86).
The second reason which is no less obvious is that within the studies and criticisms of literary translation, compared to the translation study of poetry and fiction, little attention has been paid to the study of the problems peculiar to drama texts. Few attempts have been made in applying literary stylistics to translation of dramatic texts, and the author believes that translation of dramatic texts suffice to be a valid area of studies for understanding the nature of translation. It is also believed that stylistic analysis of dramatic texts can help translators to achieve expressive equivalence.
This thesis takes the checklist of Leech and Short (1981/2001) as the framework of study. In their study, Leech and Short take literary stylistics as the framework in analyzing English prose fiction, but the literary text which this thesis takes as the object of study is a dramatic text, then how could their checklist be also effective in the present study?
Firstly, drama and fiction share some similarities between them, because both fiction and drama have plots and characters and both take dialogue as their way of communication. The main difference lies in the place of dialogue. In fiction, the places where the stories happen, the surrounding environments, narration of the stories, changing of the sites, introduction to the characters as well as the psychological activities are usually introduced to the reader by the narration of the writer. But most of these functions need to be accomplished by the dialogue between the characters in drama. Secondly, the checklist we take as the framework analyzes the stylistic features of fictional prose from the four aspects of lexical expression, syntax, figures of speech, context and cohesion. In
dramatic texts, we also have these four aspects, which are common to all literary genres. Thirdly, even though Leech and Short only analyze the stylistic features of fiction and it is not a book studying translation, we can still conduct our study by comparatively analyzing both the original text as well as the target text. So it is feasible to do the comparative study under the framework of literary stylistics.
1.4 Structure of the thesis
This thesis is composed of five parts, in which the introduction serves as the first part. The second part is devoted to an overall literature review of the translation study concerned with Pygmalion and literary stylistics. The third part introduces the theoretical framework of the present study in which several theoretical concepts related to this thesis are introduced and feasibilities of analyzing the translation of Pygmalion from the perspective of literary stylistics are testified.
In part four, detailed comparative studies of the two translated versions are carried out from the aspects of lexical expression, syntax, figures of speech, context and cohesion, to see which version better illustrates the stylistic features of the original text and to analyze why it is necessary to do literary stylistic analysis when assessing and evaluating translated works.
Part five concludes the research work done in the previous parts and summarizes the importance of literary stylistics in the analysis of the translated works as well as the strategies translators should take when doing literary translations. It is hoped that literary stylistics is not only an effective tool in assessing the translated literary works, but also one of the major concerns of translators when they do literary translation.
2 Literature Review
During the past two or three decades, developments in the fields of transformational grammar, general and contrastive linguistics, semantics, information theory, anthropology, semiotics, psychology and discourse analysis, etc. have exerted great influence on translation theory and criticism, enabling the discipline to broaden their areas of investigation and to offer fresh insights into correspondence or transference between linguistic and cultural systems (Shen, 1995/1998: 85). The much debated dichotomy of literal translation and free translation has been replaced by various linguistically-informed modern distinctions, for example, Nida’s principle of “dynamic equivalence”, Catford’s “textual equivalence” etc. Such new perspectives in specific bilingual contrastive studies have considerably promoted understanding and mastery of the core nature of translation.
But general translation studies, which usually operate at the level of linguistic correspondence, do not focus on the problems typical of literary texts. In fact, many translation critics are conscious of the essential difference in terms of style or expression between the translation of literary and non-literary texts.
In the Dictionary of Translation Studies, Shuttleworth and Cowie (2004:160) define Stylistic Equivalence (or Translational Equivalence) as “functional equivalence of elements in both original and translation aiming at an expressive identity with an invariant of identical meaning”. They believe that stylistic equivalence thus involves preserving the expressive character of (elements of) ST, while at the same time retaining as much as possible of its basic semantic content. However, even on the occasions when direct semantic correspondence cannot be established the translator should still choose a TL item which is stylistically equivalent with the given element of ST. This shows us the status of keeping the stylistic equivalence in literary translation. Of course we cannot magnify the status of stylistic equivalence, because this may bring the effect of over-translation or even pseudo-translation. But it is still very important to study the stylistic features of the original texts and try our best to find out the stylistically equivalent elements in the target language.
It may be true that when translation of non-literary texts is concerned, linguistic form can be put into secondary place compared to information, since language in such kind of texts mainly serves the purpose of carrying information. But in literary texts, writers’ manipulation of linguistic forms functions to mean for various thematic effects, such as efficient characterization, or to make the literary reality operate more effectively in the work’s thematic design. Neglecting literary writers’ artistic manipulation of language will result in the incomplete transfusion of thematic content, because their skillful manipulation of language for aesthetic effects or their effort to create a certain texture and tone serves to reinforce or to modify the themes of literary texts.
2.1 Studies concerning literary stylistics and translation studies
It was not until 1980s that western stylistics was introduced into China, and from then on, stylistic study progresses rapidly in China. In 1986, an essay under the title of To Look at the Literary Style and Translation from the Perspective of Modern Stylistics was published on Foreign Languages by Zhang Yingjin. It is the earliest essay discussing the relationship between stylistics and translation as I know. In this essay, the author believes that the stylistic features of literary works do exist and it is necessary to translate these features into the target texts. In this essay, the author also discusses the relationship between modern stylistics and translation studies by discussing from three aspects of stylistics—phonological, syntactical, and semantic aspects.
Liu Miqing is considered to be the pioneer in applying stylistics to translation studies. In 1990, Liu published an essay under the title of On Style of Translation on Foreign Languages. In this essay, Liu states that the focus of style translation is to analyze the style of the original text and to find out the stylistically equivalent elements in the target texts. Liu also believes that the style of a text is translatable and it is important to analyze the “formal markers” and “non-formal markers” of the original to adapt them to the translation.
The year of 1993 saw the coming of the influential international seminar which was held in Macao under the topic of stylistics, translation, and writing. The collection of
papers discussed in the seminar was published under the title of Essays on Stylistics (Cheng & Li, 1994). Since then stylistics began to call more and more attention in China, especially in the field of translation studies.
The year of 1995 deserves celebration because in this year, an academic book entitled Literary Stylistics and Fictional Translation by Shen Dan from Beijing University was published. In this book, questions which stylistic study care about are answered and the relationship between content and stylistic value is thoroughly discussed. In the second part of the book, Professor Shen Dan illustrates the place of literary stylistics in translation studies and criticisms. In 2002, Professor Shen Dan published another essay on China Translation under the title of On the Importance of Appling Literary Stylistics to the Discipline Construction of Translation Study, in which the concept of “deceptive equivalence” was emphasized again.
In recent years, many other essays and theses were also published under the topic of stylistics and translation from different perspectives. For example, A Literary Stylistic Approach to the Style Translation in Pride and Prejudice (Lv Ting, 2005); Stylistic Aspects of Literary Translation ——With Special Reference to the Chinese Translation of The Bridge of Madison County (Sun Hongyan, 2005); Foregrounding in Literary Translation — A Literary Stylistic Study of Mansfield’s The Garden Party (Ma Zhili, 2006) , etc. Most of these theses are concerned with the translation of fiction or poetry, with few has been found on studies of translation of drama based on the theory of literary stylistics. This is the reason why the present paper attempts to apply literary stylistics to the study of two Chinese versions of Pygmalion, and to reveal the explanatory power of literary stylistics in studies of literary translation.
2.2 Studies concerning translations of Shaw’s Pygmalion
As a prolific dramatist, George Bernard Shaw published altogether more than fifty plays, most of which have been put onto the stage all around the world during his lifetime. His dramas have been generally acknowledged as the mainstream in the 20th century English theatre. Shaw is famous for his witty and humorous language in his dramas.
Despite Shaw’s reputation as a renowned playwright in the 20th century, researches on Shaw and his plays and translation of his works are not enough outside Europe and North America. In China, Shaw has drawn a lot of attention from Chinese scholars, but researches about him mainly focus on his dramatic art and use of language with aesthetic and thematic value of his works left untouched upon. The present study takes one of Shaw’s famous plays Pygmalion to do a comparative study between its two Chinese versions, one by Lin Yutang and another by Yang Xianyi.
The first Chinese version of Pygmalion was translated by Dr. Lin Yutang in 1929 and was published in 1932. Yang Xianyi’s translation of Pygmalion was published in 1956, which was translated from the revised version of Pygmalion that was published in 1941. His translated version is the most popular one in China and has gone through several editions.
Despite the popularity of the play in China, there are so far very few studies concerning the Chinese translations of Pygmalion . As the author of the thesis finds out, there is yet no study ever carried out on Lin Yutang’s translation of Pygmalion and there are only three articles that have been published on Yang Xianyi’s translation of the play, which is the most popular version in China. The reason that Lin’s translation attracts little attention may lie in the fact that it was translated almost eighty years ago and that the language he uses is somehow different from modern Chinese.
The earliest essay on Yang Xianyi’s translation of Pygmalion was published under the title of To Look at the Translation of the Language of Lower-class People from the Chinese Version of Pygmalion by Zhang Senkuan in 1988 on Journal of Hunan University . In this study, Zhang analyzes Yang Xianyi’s translation from the viewpoint of the linguistic characteristics of the lower-class people and draws the conclusion that linguistic characteristics of the lower-class people are typically represented by features of using short sentences with simple or even faulty grammar and syntax and that Yang’s translation well preserves these linguistic features of the lower-class people. Another essay on the translation of Pygmalion was published on Foreign Languages in 1995 under the title of A Comparison Between the Two Translated Versions of Pygmalion by Yang Xianyi by Wen Jun. In this essay, a comparison between the two translated versions of
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Pygmalion by Yang Xianyi is carried out to analyze the alterations Yang Xianyi made on his first translation of Pygmalion and to find out the reasons for Yang’s revision on his previous translation. The conclusion is that the retranslated version, by resorting to more colloquial language suited to the characters and more accurate expressions in general, is a much improved version than the earlier one.
The third essay was published on Journal of Guizhou University in 1998 under the title of On the Translation of Slang and the Emphatic Patterns in Pygmalion by Sun Qinfang. In this essay, the strategies of translating slang and emphatic patterns in Pygmalion are discussed and the version translated by Yang Xianyi is analyzed.
In summary, during the past decades, not enough research work has been carried out on the translation study of Pygmalion. As a result it is worthwhile to conduct a comparative study on the two Chinese versions of Pygmalion, the first version of it by Lin Yutang and the most popular version by Yang Xianyi, from the perspective of literary stylistics.
3 Literary Stylistics as the Theoretical Framework for the Analysis of the Two Chinese Versions of Pygmalion
Stylistics, according to the definition of Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, refers to “the study of style in written or spoken language.” (Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, 1997)
Generally speaking, stylistics can be defined narrowly and broadly. In its broad sense, stylistics refers to the linguistic varieties of a certain language, including prose fiction, poetry, drama and non-literary texts such as news, legal writings, advertisements, scientific and technological writings, religious writings, etc. Stylistics in its narrow sense refers to literary stylistics. Based on its broad sense and narrow sense, stylistics can also be categorized into “general stylistics” and “literary stylistics”. (Shen, 1995/1998) The former, which covers the analysis of non-literary varieties of language or registers, is close to sociolinguistics, whereas the latter, sometimes also called linguistic stylistics, refers to the stylistic study of literary texts from linguistic perspective. However, the classification of stylistics goes beyond that, for example, there are “formal stylistics”, “discourse stylistics”, “linguistic stylistics”, “political stylistics”, “socio-cultural stylistics”, “functional stylistics” etc. All these different branches of stylistics adopt similar stylistic point of view but from different perspectives, so each branch has its own good reason. Since the main theme of this thesis is to conduct a comparative study on the two translated versions of a literary text, not the detailed stylistic classification, stylistics in its narrow sense of literary stylistics is taken as the theoretical foundation of the present thesis.
According to Shen (1995/1998: 2), Anglo-American literary stylistics originated and developed under the combined influences of developments in modern linguistics, Anglo-American practical criticism, French structuralism, the Russian Formalist School and the Prague Linguistic Circle. Marked by the use of linguistic models in the interpretation of literary texts, this is a discipline mediating between literary criticism and linguistics of different levels and in various forms (Shen, 1995/1998:2).
Widdowson (1975/1999: 3) provides us with a more informative definition of literary stylistics. “By stylistics, I mean the study of literary discourse from a linguistic orientation and I shall take the view that what distinguishes stylistics from literary criticism on the one hand and linguistics on the other is that it is essentially a means of linking the two”.
Abrams, in his A Glossary of Literary Terms (Abrams, 1981:192), defines stylistics as “a method of analyzing works of literature which proposes to replace the ‘subjectivity ’and ‘impressionism’ of standard criticism with an ‘objective’ or ‘scientific’ analysis of the style of literary texts.” In A Dictionary of Stylistics (Wales, 1989:437), Katie Wales defines stylistics as:
By far the most common kind of material studied is literary; and attention is largely text-centered. The goal of most stylistic studies is not simply to describe the formal features
of texts for their own sake, but in order to show their functional significance for the
interpretation of the text; or in order to relate literary effects to linguistics “cause” where
these are felt to be relevant. Stylists want to avoid vague and impressionistic judgments
about the way formal features are manipulated.
Leech and Short (1981/2001: 13) also point out the aim of stylistic studies as: We normally study style because we want to explain something, and in general, literary stylistics has, implicitly or explicitly, the goal of explaining the relation between
language and artistic function. ... ... From the linguist’s angle, it is ‘why does the author
here choose to express himself in this particular way?’ From the critic’s viewpoint, it is
‘How is such an aesthetic effect achieved through language?’… The aim of literary
stylistics is … to relate the critic’s concern of aesthetic appreciation with the linguist’s
concern of linguistic description.
According to the definitions of stylistics, literary stylistics operates along the lines of traditional commonsense-based interpretative strategies of literary significance and focuses on linguistic choices which are thematically or artistically motivated. More specifically, attention is directed toward two contrastive dimensions of the literary text: linguistic form and literary reality. The former constitutes the most prominent and characteristic object of investigation in literary stylistics, which mainly covers many。