As viewed from comparative stylistics on bilingual parallel texts of Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out by Mo Yan, it was found that foregrounding can be used as a device for changing stylistic features. By contrasting Mo Yan’s novel and its English translation by Howard Goldblatt, with a focus on foregrounding, we can detect the translator style of Goldblatt. Foregrounding may be characterised by two features: qualitative and quantitative foregrounding. With regard to qualitative foregrounding, there are basically two possibilities. On one hand, there is no foregrounding found in an ST while there is qualitative foregrounding shown in its TT. On the other hand, there is qualitative foregrounding found in an ST while there is no foregrounding shown in its TT. Quantitative foregrounding implies that the frequency of occurrence of certain utterances in the TT has gone beyond the reader’s expectation. To some extent, foregrounding may be considered as stylistically resistancy as a strategy for translating a literary text. No matter how deviant from the language code itself, or how far from the expected frequency, when appropriately employed, foregrounding may contribute to an upgrading of aesthetic values of a TT, and arouse target readers’ interests, and as such it can be regarded as leading to successful reception.
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