A Comparative Analysis of Proper Nouns and Linguistic Style in Two Chinese Translations of the Silmarillion Based on Defamiliarization Theory

J. R. R. Tolkien, the British author, created a second world named Middle-earth in his works. To explain the mythological system and ancient history of Middle-Earth, he finished The Silmarillion, which used defamiliarization to build a sense of distance from the real world. The book is particularly special for its proper nouns and linguistic style, which, in the translation process, play an important role in the preservation of the defamiliarizing atmosphere in the original texts. Thus, this study begins with a comparison between two Chinese translations of The Silmarillion: Li Yaos and Deng Jiawans editions. Three examples, each of proper nouns and text segments, were selected from the original texts to proceed with comparative analysis of the two translations, respectively. During the analysis, Venuti's theory of domesticated and foreignized translation and Shklovsky's defamiliarization theory were used to analyze how the two translations affected the defamiliarizing expression in the original text. This study found that Li Yao's translation foreignized proper nouns while occasionally domesticating them phonetically, which helped to convey a sense of strangeness; however, the linguistic style tended to be domesticated, greatly weakening the defamiliarization effect. By contrast, Deng Jiawan also foreignized proper nouns but occasionally domesticated them semantically, which might dilute the unfamiliar atmosphere; yet the linguistic style remained foreignizing, effectively preserving the exotic epic style of the original text.