Free Indirect Style Across Languages: The Case of John Updike’s Writing and Its Mandarin Renderings
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| Year of publication | 2018 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The proposed paper explores the cross-linguistic dimension of free indirect style using John Updike’s writing (original in English) and its Mandarin renderings. In the analysis, I identify at least the following stylistic strategies in Updike’s free indirect style: mixing of tense, manipulation of subject-verb agreement, and inversion. In addition, I argue that Updike’s skillful use of the above stylistic strategies is, and can only be, specific to the English language, and that presents an immediate dilemma to translators into Mandarin Chinese as the structural means identified do not exist at all in the Mandarin system. In particular, Mandarin is notoriously a tenseless language and does not inflectionally mark subject-verb agreement; being a topic-comment language, Mandarin Chinese also has an information-packaging system that is very different from English as a subject-predicate language. The present paper will look into the ways how Mandarin translators, with no linguistic means comparable to the English original, (have to) adapt and render Updike’s style in their reproductions of the same literary scene, considering corresponding passages in English and Mandarin. |