A Study of Defamiliarization Devices in the Translation of The Moon Opera

Abstract

Defamiliarization is a literary term originally put forward by the Russian formalist Shklovsky. It refers to the fact that in literary creation, the author can describe things in strange and novel ways, thus extending the readers' perception time and increasing aesthetic pleasure. Later, the term is gradually applied to the field of translation, and defamiliarized translation skills evolve. Defamiliarized translation mainly refers to keeping the cultural and linguistic heterogeneity of the source language as much as possible in the process of translation, which makes aesthetic appreciation difficult. Literary translation can preserve the literariness and artistry of the original text by means of defamiliarized translation. Taking the English translation of Bi Feiyu's novel The Moon Opera as the object of study, this paper analyzes the translation means and effects of defamiliarization from the phonetic aspect, lexical aspect and syntactic aspect in order to provide some reflections on the translation of contemporary Chinese novels. In the translation process of The Moon Opera, out of respect for the original text, the original author and Chinese culture, the translator adopts defamiliarization translation through transliteration plus explanation, literal translation and free translation to retain the exotic flavor of the original text, producing an "alienation" effect and bringing a fresh aesthetic experience to the readers in the target language. This slightly challenging aesthetic process brings great aesthetic pleasure to the target language readers and promotes the communication between different cultures.