Translating the Avant-Garde: A Narratological and Stylistic Study of China’s Avant-Garde Fiction in English Translation

Abstract

Taking Wang Jing’s edited volume China’s Avant-Garde Fiction: An Anthology as the object of study, this paper draws on narratology and stylistics and adopts a comparative textual approach to examine how foregrounded language, narrative perspective, and non-linear narration are handled in the English translation. It further explores how translators’ strategic choices affect the transmission of the experimental nature, aesthetic value, and thematic significance of these works. The study finds that semantic deviation is often preserved in full, whereas phonological and lexical deviations tend to be normalized or even omitted. Such tendencies may be related to the conventions of English usage, grammatical constraints, and the consideration of target readers’ reception, but they may also weaken the literary value of the original texts. At the narrative level, although translators generally strive to retain narrative perspective, additions and omissions sometimes result in distortions; meanwhile, non-linear narrative structures are often simplified into linear forms through tense shifts and paragraph reorganization.