Foregrounding and English-Chinese Novel Translation

Mostly employed to analyze poems or (post)modernist novels abundant in foregrounding techniques, foregrounding theory is not often applied to traditional novels, for foregrounding thereof is on the whole not as conspicuous, hence far less study on the translation of traditional novels from the perspective of foregrounding theory. Actually, when it comes to the translation of traditional novels, most losses are the result of translators’ inadequate foregrounding awareness, which leads to a failure of representing the original foregrounding stylistic effects. This book, by means of comparison and contrast of the three Chinese translations of The Picture of Dorian Gray, is intended to demonstrate that translators should pay special attention to various foregrounding devices in source text so as to represent them in target text to the best of their ability with a view to achieving stylistically functional equivalence instead of referential correspondence with different degrees of losses of aesthetic and thematic values. The analyzing processes and the basic argument of this book are particularly useful to professional translators or anyone else who wants to undertake translation tasks.