On the restoration of styles in literary translation: translation and commentary of the village in the mountains

Abstract

This project is a case study of English to Chinese literary translation. Through the translation and self-evaluation of a selected passage from David Diskin's The Village in the Mountains, the author intends to demonstrate that the stylistic reproduction of the target language in literary translation requires creative or poetic adaptation by the translator, with the ultimate goal of providing the target reader with an aesthetic experience equivalent to that of the original readers. To this end, several issues are discussed in the paper, including textual analysis, translation skopos, translation strategies and translation difficulties.