黑人英语的翻译策略研究-英语专业毕业论文翻译材料.doc

太原科技大学
TAIYUAN UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE&TECHNOLOGY

毕业论文附翻译材料

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2015年6月

原文（节选）

A study on Strategies of African American
Vernacular English Translation

---based on Zhang Wanli and Cheng Shi’s
Chinese translation versions of The Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn

A Dissertation
Submitted for the Degree of Master
On Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics

Feng Ruowen

Under the Supervision of
Prof. Ding Lijun

School of Foreign Languages
Nanchang Hangkong University, Nanchang, China

June 2013
Contents
1 Introduction 1
2 Analysis of translation methods of AAVE 2
2.1 Standard colloquial language method 3
2.2 Malapropism method 3
2.3 Syntax variation routinization 5
2.4 Semantic regeneration and annotation method 6
References

1 Introduction
Nowadays, as the growth of the range and depth of globalization, cultural integration became increasingly evident. African-American Culture and AAVE have gradually attracted more people’s attention in recent years. As a special kind of dialect, AAVE possesses complex social and cultural functions. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn written by American writer Mark Twain is the most representative work of using AAVE, it occupied immortal place in the history of American literature. However, owing to syntax differences between AAVE and Standard English in phonetics, vocabulary, sentence structure and other aspects, besides, scholars are still stuck at the exploratory stage on the study of its translation principles and methods, translation works are quite different with diversity of translation methods and principles, thus literary critics domestic and overseas gave contradictory comments. Under this circumstance, it is necessary to conduct further discussion and research on AAVE translation.
Translation involves conversing two languages with different cultural context to realize the integration and communication. A good translation work can not only bring out the “form” of the original, but also reflect the “spirit”. With the guidance of translatology, linguistics and relevant theories, the ways of description, summary and comparison were used to study the AAVE translation strategies. The origin and definition of AAVE, the status quo of dialect and AAVE translation were summarized and it also pointed out the translation plight of AAVE. Zhang Wanli and Cheng Shi have translated The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn into two different versions. The principles they followed and methods they used in AAVE translation were widely divergent, so the two works have their own prominent feature and shortcomings that can not be ignored and provided a specific example of AAVE translation. The comparative study and analysis were conducted on those two works from different theoretical perspectives, the importance of theoretical guidance was demonstrated, the advantages and disadvantages of those two works under theoretical rules.
On the basis of comparison and analysis of those two versions, the thesis raises five principles of AAVE translation, which should also follow the basic translation principles. They are principle of reproducing, the function of AAVE; principle of foreignization rather than domestication; principle of reproducing the language aesthetic effects of AAVE; principle of overall coordination; principle of respecting the culture of African Americans. At the same time, based on the advantages of those two versions and previous methods, the author concludes such translation Strategies of AAVE as standard colloquial language method; equivalent dialect blending translation; malapropism method; syntax variation routinization method; semantic regeneration and annotation method.
2 Analysis of translation methods of AAVE
It finally concludes that each method or strategy of translation has its merits and demerits, so in the course of translating AAVE translators should use them properly and complementarily to target different situations so as to achieve the best effect of translation.
A translator should be the master of bilingual first of all; the Chinese proficiency level is one of the most important conditions determining the translation ability of the translator. A translator’s Chinese proficiency level indicates not only his proficiency level of mastering standard Chinese, but also the ability of mastering the other kinds of expression as classical Chinese and dialects. In literary translation, in order to convey characteristics of characters and aesthetic sense of the original, the translator must also have considerable artistic expressive force, including certain of translation skills, fluent writing style and extensive knowledge. (Zheng Hailing, 2000: 264-269) In other words, the translator should preserve a high level in Chinese language using and literary accomplishments. Only possessed flexible ability in utilizing Chinese can translators accurately and appropriately reproduce the original meaning and style, otherwise they will have too much troubles in finding the most appropriate expression means in the target language. The using of various methods in AAVE translation is an obvious example.
2.1 Standard colloquial language method
The main style of AAVE is colloquial style. Standard colloquial language method is to use colloquial Chinese to translate AAVE; in general, the functional equivalent language of AAVE to Chinese is not some appointed dialect, but some slang or colloquial dialects. Although this kind of approach can not reproduce the irregular phonetics and grammatical forms of the original, sometimes by the way of vocabulary and rhetoric compensation, it may retain the special features of AAVE of the original text. The majority of translators adopted standard colloquial language method to translate AAVE, which of course is inseparable with the translation concept of translators and macro context of that time, and on the other hand, it also related to their proficiency in mastering standard Chinese. Chinese is ideographic written characters; some special pronunciation generally can not be reflected in the text, and the "foregrounding” effect of Chinese usually appeared in lexical level. Subject to the constraints of Chinese dialects, Chinese fictions rarely used dialects in creating, but there was no lack of vivid and detailed descriptions on the people of lower society status. While this artistic effect is achieved almost by using colloquial language and slangs. For example, Sun Zhili had used colloquial style in translation practices Tess of the D'Urbervilles against dialects of the original text. The using of standard colloquial language method in translation works is much more comfortable for readers, the works were easy to be read, and seemed quite fluent. In the situation of trying best to embody the features of original style with overall coordination, this method is preferred by many people.
2.2 Malapropism method
While translating, people emulate the wrongly written words intentionally in order to make fun of it or to achieve interesting purpose, is being called rhetorical approach malapropism. In other words, the author imitated, recorded or cited other people’s errors to show ironic and achieve comedy purpose. In literary works, the non-standardized English used by African Americans have been in literary form, and become an indispensable part of shaping images of African Americans, but when AAVE was translated into standard Chinese, it is difficult to reflect the characteristics of phonetics. If malapropism method was using properly, the advantages are quite obvious. It can bring “defamiliarization” effects to arouse the reader’s attention in order to achieve “foregrounding” of language.
“Distorted literary form will attract extra attention of readers to identify and understand the new-made words... just like some irregular form such as italic, incomplete phrases, alliteration, repetition and crossword puzzles frequently used in colloquial language, each wrongly written word would leave a profound impression in the brain."(Chang Yaoxin, 2007:129) For this reason, using malapropism method can arouse reader's attention, so it reproduced the special effects in AAVE translation. Although it will be a little difficult in reading sometimes, if people read loud, it would give them a special flavor. Readers from different places may have different feelings, but it will not arouse their resentment. The using of malapropism is an attempt in phonetics, and of course, AAVE translation can not just care about the standards in phonetics level, it should relate to overall expression significance. In addition, the use of homophones and homophonic words in the whole discourse around should keep consistent from top to end, and while using homophonic words, they should keep to certain systematic and regularity. Malapropism played a creative effect in AAVE translation process, refreshed people in a new way, and it conveyed dialect signals of the original author wanted to express in some extent; at the same time it enabled the reader to understand the intent of the original author, reached functional equivalence.
Except that the using of malapropism method has no principle to follow, as it just conveys a language variant signal to readers, in general, translators picked new words random, made readers feel like in a fog. Such as one of the translation version of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn created by Cheng Shi, he used large amounts of malapropism toward Negro Jim’s words, in some extent, made readers read intermittently without fluency. Therefore, it is recommended that the use of this method should not be too much while translating, otherwise, not only it can not reproduce the “foregrounding” aesthetic effect, but also will affect the readability of the translation.
2.3 Syntax variation routinization
From linguistic point of view, the biggest difference between contemporary AAVE and Standard English is syntactic structure. Syntax is the most regular part of language, it changed the smallest, compared with the other elements of language, and it is the slowest part of being assimilated by Standard English. The most obvious difference in AAVE structure reflects on the use of “be”, which is mainly used to indicate habitual or frequent happening situation, there is no verb form of “be” in present tense, just infinitive; when AAVE used in past tense and past perfect tense, there is no “–ed” form. Many AAVE verbs have no changes on person and number, usually, the subject of a verb and the number are represented by the context or a word in the sentence; Secondly, it performed in the differences of plural form, such as in the phrases indicate amount, the suffix of noun plural form is often omitted, in AAVE, while a small number of nouns changed into plural form, they just change the ending of the word; while expressing stress, AAVE does not through the way of pronouncing with stress, but with a double subject, so in terms of subject repetition sentence, we should omit one of the subjects while translating; at the same time, one of the obvious characteristics of AAVE is to ignore syntax selection and use double negation or multiple negation, for this reason, the double or multiple negations in AAVE should be translated into negative sentence. Due to the particularity of AAVE syntax, while in translation process, translators should not ignore the above significant features of AAVE and make sure syntax variation routinization in translation; this is the indispensable method in AAVE translation.
2.4 Semantic regeneration and annotation method
In cross-cultural communication, there are some cultural vacancy phenomenons. The so-called “vacancy” refers to language and culture phenomenon of a nation does not exist in another ethnic group. Vacancy includes two categories as language vacancy and culture vacancy. Language vacancy is semantics while cultural vacancy is loaded by language symbols, including phonetics, syntax, vocabulary and rhetoric vacancies; cultural vacancy refers to vacancies formed by means of non-verbal differences in the process of cross-cultural communication, such as gesture, body languages among different ethnic groups, different characteristics of communicative subjects in the aspects of national character, thinking pattern, ideas, feelings and psychological association. Culture vacancies brought a great challenge to interlingual translation, because the omitted or preset content in culture vacancies are usually not in direct context within the discourse or out of the discourse. Semantic regeneration method refers to the transcription or literal translation with the supplementary of meaning. Annotation method helps the target language readers insight into the appeal of the exotic language and culture, so that the target-text readers and the original readers could have resonation in thoughts and feelings. In addition, annotation can also be the description of translator intentions. If translators handled this translation method properly, the translator could try to keep the characteristics of original language and it will make the translation more readable and easy to understand.

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References
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[12] 郑海凌，2000，《文学翻译学》[M]。文心出版社。译文

南昌航空大学
硕 士 学 位 论 文
（学位研究生）

黑人英语的翻译策略研究
——以《哈克贝利·费恩历险记》的张万里
和成时译本为例 （节选）

硕士研究生：冯若雯
导师：丁丽军 教授
申请学位级别：硕 士
学科、专业：外国语言学及应用语言学
所在单位：外国语学院
授予学位单位：南昌航空大学

1 介绍
在全球一体化的今天，各个国家间文化融合越来越明显。美国黑人文化与黑人英语近年来也逐渐引起人们的关注和研究。美国黑人英语是一种特殊的美国方言，表现出了复杂的社会文化功能。美国文学家马克·吐温著作的《哈克贝利·费恩历险记》(The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn)是黑人英语使用的文学著作中最具代表性的作品，在美国文学史上有着不朽的地位。然而，由于黑人英语与标准英语在语音、词汇、句子结构等方面存在很大的语法差异，且国内外学者对方言及黑人英语的翻译原则和方法研究处于探索阶段，译者的作品各有千秋。他们使用的翻译方法和遵循的原则也大不相同，国内外的文学评论家对这些译作褒贬不一。因此，有必要对文学作品中黑人英语的翻译手法与策略进行深入的探讨和研
究。
翻译能将两种文化背景下的语言进行了很好的融合和交流。好的译作既能表现出与原著“形”的统一，又能将作品所表达的“神”体现出来。在翻译学、语言学等相关理论支持上，本研究使用了描写综述、译文对比等方法对黑人英语的翻译策略进行了探究，归纳总结了美国黑人英语的起源及界定，方言翻译以及黑人英语翻译的研究现状，讨论了其翻译困境。《哈克贝利·费恩历险记》的张万里译本和成时译本在黑人英语的翻译上，使用的翻译方法与策略，遵循的翻译原则大相径庭，两部作品