Pride and Prejudice is the master work of Jane Austen (1775-1817), who observes the life from a female sensitive perspective and paints the common people in common live with distinct and delicate tongue. The story is about a simple worldly wisdom and love in twists and turns in a small town, but by Jane Austen’s incisive language and unique conversational dialogue, the characters of the novel are particularly attractive to people's attention. The dialogue is the most important thing of the character’s language, which also becomes an important means and ways shaping the characters. In Pride and Prejudice, characters are distinct and bright, and language is sharp, satiric or humorous. For example: astute Elizabeth, vulgar and shallow Mrs. Bennett, humorous and witty Mr. Bennett, and frank and lovely Mr. Darcy, etc. Each and every fresh character lets us satisfy a craving. This novel, translated into Chinese, has reached a wide Chinese audience, and the dialogues of which are also enjoyable. There are several versions of Chinese translation of this book, and each of them tries hard to present its soul to readers. However, because of the ambiguity and persity of translation and the different understandings of the original book by each translator, translations may not all actually reproduce the author’s writing style. This thesis, take the translations of the dialogues in this book as examples, briefly discusses how translators reproduce the original style in translations.
2. A Review of Pride and Prejudice文献综述
Edmund Wilson, the famous American literary critics, said: “in the recent one hundred years, there were a few interesting revolutions on the literary history. The renewed literature flavors had influenced almost all the writers’ reputation, except the author Shakespeare and Jane Austen”. Wilson’s words didn’t make a mountain out of a molehill. Austen had received highly praise from generation to generation with her six time-tested novels. These novels are all the classic works. Pride and Prejudice is a really rare treasure in the world literature. No wonder William Somerset Maugham puts it as one of the ten world classic novels.
2.1 The Author of Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen was born in 1775 and died in 1817. During the time, the British novel was in a temporary period, which was a shortage of works in transition. In the first half of the 18th Century, four realism novel masters, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Laurence Sterne and Tobias Smollett appeared. But in the 1970s, there came to the Sentimental novelists represented by Fanny Burney and the Gothic novelists represented by Ann Radcliffe. Although those works were fashionable for a time, they still showed their starvation because of their clear emotional and the magical color. From 1770s to the first ten years of the 19th century, with the market being flooded with these kinds of works, there were no new important works being produced. Fortunately, Austen has issued the six novels from 1811 to 1818: Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. These novels led the sentimental and the gothic novels lose their market and made them so artificial by their rational words. This helped Britain clear the way to welcome the arrival of the climax of realistic novel in the 1830s.