Exploring the Diverse Translating Nature of Narrative Aesthetic: New Perspectives on Fictional Translation

Preface

The field of translation criticism has been a part of applied translation studies and aims at providing a value judgment for translated texts. This interest in the study of translation quality assessment has led to the development of a variety of schemes and approaches for a contrastive analysis of the source text and its translations. In any analysis of literary translation, whether the purpose is a comprehensive translation comparison or quality assessment, setting up clear evaluation criteria or assessment parameters is of great importance for establishing a lucid evaluative framework in the analysis of the specific characteristics found in a literary text. As Beatriz Rodríguez in Literary Translation Quality Assessment contends, “Translation criticism requires the implementation of some assessment criteria and of a systematic scheme of analysis of the two texts to reach the evaluation of the target texts” (6). Otherwise, the evaluation or analysis will only amount to intuitive comments on the shifts, deviations, or mismatches of the textual profile for the source and the target texts.

Since the 1960s, the range of theoretical stances has led to the development of different approaches for literary translation analysis and quality assessment. The earlier linguistic- and discourse-oriented functional approaches quite contrasted with the more recent discourses on the cultural or corpus-based approaches. It is thus reasonable to assume that a universal framework that can be applied in the evaluation of all kinds of literary translated works does not exist. This realization exposes the practical problem of literary translation analysis: the evaluation criteria and the precise framework necessarily need to be established in different analyses due to the particular genre and stylistic devices each text contains and showcases. Further research on the methods of literary translation analysis and quality assessment is indeed necessary.

The scholarly approaches to literary translation from a stylistic viewpoint have noted that it is essential to use the expressive function and the aesthetic effect of a literary text as a prerequisite for the practice of translation (see, for instance, Shen 1998: 6-10, Boase-Beier 2006: 4-6, Parks 2007:14). When it comes to the analysis of literary translation from a stylistic perspective, however, the current approaches do not have much to offer in terms of analytical framework, procedure, or means. Bearing this problem in mind, this book proposes a new evaluative model to the analysis of literary translated work from a stylistic perspective. In order to show the applicapability of this evaluative model to the works of diverse literary style, the approach proposed here is employed to studying the Chinese translation of two modernist works stylistically different in nature. The investigation examines how effective the Chinese translators are in dealing with the particular diegetic voices, in particular ideolects and paralanguage, and representing the narrators and characters’ speeches and thoughts in the translation. Whereas little attention has been paid toward investigating the pragmatic style in fictional translation, the purposes for writing this book then are the following:

(1) Reflect on the assessment models and methods employed in the evaluation of literary translation and devise a dual approach that conjoins relevance theory with cognitive models for a precise translation-oriented stylistic analysis.

(2) Conduct emperical studies to unveil the actual pragmatic stylistic differences between the original text and the translated texts.

(3) Employ the concept of iconicity to develop new creative translation strategies and solutions.

The main concern of this book is with translators and their translation practice. It is hoped that readers from both industry and the academia will be inspired by this study to think more deeply about the relevant and practical issues of how to deal with literary stylistic devices and represent their idiosyncrasies in translation.

The book is organized into three sections that cover the theoretical research and two case studies. The first section has three chapters. Chapter 1 reviews the contemporary translation theories and current methodological models for literary translation analysis and criticism. A single model that offers an evaluative procedure for accessing the translator’s rendering of literary style has not yet been devised. In line with Ernst-August Gutt’s proposition that translation is not merely a mechanical process of decoding and coding the message in the source text in equivalent terms, Chapter 2 reviews a set of relevance-theoretic criteria and the possible applications of Relevance Theory to the quality assessment of literary translation. However, when justifying the translator’s choice and decision on interpreting and delivering linguistic peculiarities embedded in a literary text, the analysis in the relevance-theoretic perspective is usually oriented around impressionistic or imprecise intuition. Therefore, Chapter 3 proposes a dual approach in which relevance theory is conjoined with cognitive models to conduct a translation-oriented stylistic analysis of William Faulkner’s and Edith Wharton’s novels.

The second section of the book (Chapters 4-7) focuses on the translation of heteroglossia in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. Taking the form of code-switching between blacks and whites, this novel is appreciated for a type of literary heteroglossia that serves a performed ideology. In terms of the poetic function of narrative style, Faulkner’s use of a variety of idiolects as narrative voices conveys the social origin and the disposition of each character who is speaking, for example, a more standard southern dialect for the white middle class. This section examines two Chinese translations of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and focuses on how the polyphonic structure, the idiosyncratic diction, and the style of each narrator in the novel are dealt with and represented in each translation. This examination is organized around the question of narrative voice: What do we know about the textual narrator? If that narrator has a voice, how does that voice become manifest in the translation? By way of a detailed analysis, the reader will see both translators’ renderings as exhibiting apparent changes in diction and note that an understanding of the particular linguistic means employed by Faulkner to construct each narrator’s voice is essential for the translator to achieve stylistic correspondence and connection to the particular diction used in the original.

The third section (Chapters 8 & 9) focuses on the translation of paralanguage and nonverbal style in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. Paralanguage as intonational markers became for Wharton an effective narrative strategy and engaging medium for characterizing various speech styles. Wharton also showed much initiative in depicting nonverbal communicative activities through which the complexity of psychological states and the subtlety of physical movement were jointly configured to portray the particular attributes of her characters and their motives and attitudes. Such vocal and nonverbal orchestration using paralinguistic description serves as communicative clues and presents the translator with a rich potential for interpretation. The study presented in this research examines the particular linguistic features of heteroglossia as they are encoded in the form of paralanguage and measures the stylistic effects of the linguistic devices that Wharton has used in constructing the diegetic voices. How the translators in Taiwan deal with these paralinguistic vocal features and nonverbal gestures and whether their renderings do take on functional and expressive significance are the center and focus of investigation.

Exploring the Diverse Translating Nature of Narrative Aesthetic: New Perspectives on Fictional Translation is geared toward translation scholars, instructors of literary translation, student translators, and professional practitioners, all of whom are concerned with increasing the stylistic quality of literary translation. The major point this book will make is the usefulness of stylistic approach to the analysis of literary translation and the necessity of incorporating stylistic approaches into any translation-oriented text analysis, i.e, “a type of reading adapted to translation,” that can sharpen one’s sensitivity to the workings of linguistic means and their stylistic functions (Boase-Beier, Stylistic Approaches, 24). It is hoped that this book will provide new insights into the role of style in both the practice and the ongoing analysis of literary translation.

以上內容節錄自《Exploring the Diverse Translating Nature of Narrative Aesthetic: New Perspectives on Fictional Translation》 Yi-ping Wu（吳怡萍）◎著．白象文化出版

Preface

The field of translation criticism has been a part of applied translation studies and aims at providing a value judgment for translated texts. This interest in the study of translation quality assessment has led to the development of a variety of schemes and approaches for a contrastive analysis of the source text and its translations. In any analysis of literary translation, whether the purpose is a comprehensive translation comparison or quality assessment, setting up clear evaluation...

The field of translation criticism has been a part of applied translation studies and aims at providing a value judgment for translated texts. This interest in the study of translation quality assessment has led to the development of a variety of schemes and approaches for a contrastive analysis of the source text and its translations. In any analysis of literary translation, whether the purpose is a comprehensive translation comparison or quality assessment, setting up clear evaluation criteria or assessment parameters is of great importance for establishing a lucid evaluative framework in the analysis of the specific characteristics found in a literary text. As Beatriz Rodríguez in Literary Translation Quality Assessment contends, “Translation criticism requires the implementation of some assessment criteria and of a systematic scheme of analysis of the two texts to reach the evaluation of the target texts” (6). Otherwise, the evaluation or analysis will only amount to intuitive comments on the shifts, deviations, or mismatches of the textual profile for the source and the target texts.

Since the 1960s, the range of theoretical stances has led to the development of different approaches for literary translation analysis and quality assessment. The earlier linguistic- and discourse-oriented functional approaches quite contrasted with the more recent discourses on the cultural or corpus-based approaches. It is thus reasonable to assume that a universal framework that can be applied in the evaluation of all kinds of literary translated works does not exist. This realization exposes the practical problem of literary translation analysis: the evaluation criteria and the precise framework necessarily need to be established in different analyses due to the particular genre and stylistic devices each text contains and showcases. Further research on the methods of literary translation analysis and quality assessment is indeed necessary.

The scholarly approaches to literary translation from a stylistic viewpoint have noted that it is essential to use the expressive function and the aesthetic effect of a literary text as a prerequisite for the practice of translation (see, for instance, Shen 1998: 6-10, Boase-Beier 2006: 4-6, Parks 2007:14). When it comes to the analysis of literary translation from a stylistic perspective, however, the current approaches do not have much to offer in terms of analytical framework, procedure, or means. Bearing this problem in mind, this book proposes a new evaluative model to the analysis of literary translated work from a stylistic perspective. In order to show the applicapability of this evaluative model to the works of diverse literary style, the approach proposed here is employed to studying the Chinese translation of two modernist works stylistically different in nature. The investigation examines how effective the Chinese translators are in dealing with the particular diegetic voices, in particular ideolects and paralanguage, and representing the narrators and characters’ speeches and thoughts in the translation. Whereas little attention has been paid toward investigating the pragmatic style in fictional translation, the purposes for writing this book then are the following:

(1) Reflect on the assessment models and methods employed in the evaluation of literary translation and devise a dual approach that conjoins relevance theory with cognitive models for a precise translation-oriented stylistic analysis.

(2) Conduct emperical studies to unveil the actual pragmatic stylistic differences between the original text and the translated texts.

(3) Employ the concept of iconicity to develop new creative translation strategies and solutions.

The main concern of this book is with translators and their translation practice. It is hoped that readers from both industry and the academia will be inspired by this study to think more deeply about the relevant and practical issues of how to deal with literary stylistic devices and represent their idiosyncrasies in translation.

The book is organized into three sections that cover the theoretical research and two case studies. The first section has three chapters. Chapter 1 reviews the contemporary translation theories and current methodological models for literary translation analysis and criticism. A single model that offers an evaluative procedure for accessing the translator’s rendering of literary style has not yet been devised. In line with Ernst-August Gutt’s proposition that translation is not merely a mechanical process of decoding and coding the message in the source text in equivalent terms, Chapter 2 reviews a set of relevance-theoretic criteria and the possible applications of Relevance Theory to the quality assessment of literary translation. However, when justifying the translator’s choice and decision on interpreting and delivering linguistic peculiarities embedded in a literary text, the analysis in the relevance-theoretic perspective is usually oriented around impressionistic or imprecise intuition. Therefore, Chapter 3 proposes a dual approach in which relevance theory is conjoined with cognitive models to conduct a translation-oriented stylistic analysis of William Faulkner’s and Edith Wharton’s novels.

The second section of the book (Chapters 4-7) focuses on the translation of heteroglossia in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. Taking the form of code-switching between blacks and whites, this novel is appreciated for a type of literary heteroglossia that serves a performed ideology. In terms of the poetic function of narrative style, Faulkner’s use of a variety of idiolects as narrative voices conveys the social origin and the disposition of each character who is speaking, for example, a more standard southern dialect for the white middle class. This section examines two Chinese translations of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and focuses on how the polyphonic structure, the idiosyncratic diction, and the style of each narrator in the novel are dealt with and represented in each translation. This examination is organized around the question of narrative voice: What do we know about the textual narrator? If that narrator has a voice, how does that voice become manifest in the translation? By way of a detailed analysis, the reader will see both translators’ renderings as exhibiting apparent changes in diction and note that an understanding of the particular linguistic means employed by Faulkner to construct each narrator’s voice is essential for the translator to achieve stylistic correspondence and connection to the particular diction used in the original.

The third section (Chapters 8 & 9) focuses on the translation of paralanguage and nonverbal style in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. Paralanguage as intonational markers became for Wharton an effective narrative strategy and engaging medium for characterizing various speech styles. Wharton also showed much initiative in depicting nonverbal communicative activities through which the complexity of psychological states and the subtlety of physical movement were jointly configured to portray the particular attributes of her characters and their motives and attitudes. Such vocal and nonverbal orchestration using paralinguistic description serves as communicative clues and presents the translator with a rich potential for interpretation. The study presented in this research examines the particular linguistic features of heteroglossia as they are encoded in the form of paralanguage and measures the stylistic effects of the linguistic devices that Wharton has used in constructing the diegetic voices. How the translators in Taiwan deal with these paralinguistic vocal features and nonverbal gestures and whether their renderings do take on functional and expressive significance are the center and focus of investigation.

Exploring the Diverse Translating Nature of Narrative Aesthetic: New Perspectives on Fictional Translation is geared toward translation scholars, instructors of literary translation, student translators, and professional practitioners, all of whom are concerned with increasing the stylistic quality of literary translation. The major point this book will make is the usefulness of stylistic approach to the analysis of literary translation and the necessity of incorporating stylistic approaches into any translation-oriented text analysis, i.e, “a type of reading adapted to translation,” that can sharpen one’s sensitivity to the workings of linguistic means and their stylistic functions (Boase-Beier, Stylistic Approaches, 24). It is hoped that this book will provide new insights into the role of style in both the practice and the ongoing analysis of literary translation.

The field of translation criticism has been a part of applied translation studies and aims at providing a value judgment for translated texts. This interest in the study of translation quality assessment has led to the development of a variety of schemes and approaches for a contrastive analysis of the source text and its translations. In any analysis of literary translation, whether the purpose is a comprehensive translation comparison or quality assessment, setting up clear evaluation criteria...

Acknowledgements
Preface

Part I　Theoretical Basis for Investigating Fictional Translation

Chapter 1　Models and Methods for Assessing Literary Translations: A Comparative Study
1.1　The Comparative Model and Contrastive Analysis
1.2　The Process-Oriented Model and Interpretive Analysis
1.3　The Causal Model and Explanatory Analysis 11
1.4　A Summarizing Comparison and the Issues in Question
1.5　The Present State of the Research and Study Objectives

Chapter 2　Assessment of Literary Stylistics in Fictional Translation from a Relevance Theory Perspective: An Overview of Method and Practice
2.1　The Central Tenet of Relevance Theory (RT)
2.2　Preliminary Analysis from the Perspective of Relevance Theory
2.3　Relevance Criteria for Quality Assessment of TT
2.4　Relevance-based Evaluation and Its Predicament
2.5　Conclusion

Chapter 3　Recognition of Diegetic Voice and Its Literary Effectiveness in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Wharton’s The Age of Innocence
3.1　The Stylistic Approaches to Literature
3.2　Syntactic Style as a Means of Recreating Heterologlossia
3.3　Paralinguistic and Nonverbal Style as a Means of Characterization
3.4　Interfacing Cognitive Stylistics and Relevance Theory for Translational Style Research
3.5　Conclusion

Part II　Translation of Heteroglossia in The Sound and the Fury

Chapter 4　The Translation of Benjy’s Pristine Mind Style: A Study of the Iconic Communicative Clues and Their Expressivity
4.1　Foregrounding the Linguistic Means
4.2　Translator’s Renderings and Devices
4.3　Stylistic Value of Direct Translation and Contextual Effect
4.4　Conclusion

Chapter 5　The Translation of Quentin’s Interior Monologue: A Study of Discourse Connectivity and Relevance Relation
5.1 Foregrounding the Linguistic Means
5.2 Translator’s Renderings and Devices
5.3 Types and Degrees of Relevance and Communicative Effects
5.4 Conclusion

Chapter 6　The Translation of Non-standard Use of Discourse Connectives and Pseudo Subclauses in Jason’s Soliloquy: A Study of Semantic Constraint and Its Representation
6.1　Foregrounding the Linguistic Means
6.2 Translator’s Renderings and Devices
6.3 Semantic Constraint and Translation Suggestions
6.4 Conclusion

Chapter 7　The Translation of Narrator’s Diction in the Dilsey Section: A Study of Translatability and Interpretive Resemblance
7.1　Foregrounding the Linguistic Means
7.2　Translator’s Renderings and Devices
7.3　Resemblance Strategies in Translation for Relevance
7.4　Conclusion


Part III　 Translation of Paralanguage and Nonverbal Style in The Age of Innocence

Chapter 8　Paralanguage as Conversational Implicature: A Pragmaticstylistic Study of Paralinguistic Vocal Features and Its implication for Literary Translation
8.1　Foregrounding the Paralinguistic Means
8.2　Translator’s Oralization of Paralingusitic Means
8.3　Iconization of the Paralanguage in Translation
8.4　Conclusion

Chapter 9　Nonverbal Communication as Conversational Implicature: A Study of Description and Transcription of Body Language
9.1　Foregrounding the Kinesic Constructs
9.2　Translator’s Oralization of Kinesic Components
9.3　Iconization of the Kinesic Constructs in Translation
9.4　Conclusion

Conclusion Future Research on Stylistic Fictional Translation and Pedagogy

Works Cited

Index

Acknowledgements
Preface

Part I　Theoretical Basis for Investigating Fictional Translation

Chapter 1　Models and Methods for Assessing Literary Translations: A Comparative Study
1.1　The Comparative Model and Contrastive Analysis
1.2　The Process-Oriented Model and Interpretive Analysis
1.3　The Causal Model and Explanatory Analysis 11
1.4　A Summarizing Comparison and the Issues in Question
1.5　The Present State of the Research and Study Objectives

Chapter 2　Assessment of Liter...