Chapter One INTRODUCTION
1.1 Research Background
The “cultural turn” in translation studies that emerged in the 1990s greatly expanded the research scope of translation activities into all fields of social culture, such as colonialism, feminism, hegemony, discourse, rights, history and ethics. In the 1980s, the French literary translator, translation theorist and philosopher Antoine Berman, as the pioneer of translation ethics research, proposed the correct ethical goal of translation behavior is “receiving the foreign as foreign”. He points out that the translator should respect and highlight the original work and its differences in the target language and culture. André Lefevere (1992) and Susan Bassnett firstly propose the concept of “cultural turn” in translation studies in their book Translation, History and Culture. Since the 1990s, with the “cultural turn”, ethics has increasingly become a topic of discussion among translators.
The “cultural turn” of translation studies means that researchers and translators should abandon the narrow view that translation is just the change of language codes. They should go beyond the boundary of language and think it over in a broader cultural environment and solve the problems in it. The broader cultural environment mentioned here includes historical factors, power mechanism, ideology, patrons and social culture beyond language and text. The American deconstructionist translation theorist Lawrence Venuti (1998) describes his “ethics of difference” in his book The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference. Therefore, the ethical issue is a major concern of translation theory research in the context of “culture turn”. The so-called translation ethics is defined as the moral standard the active actors follow in the translation activities (Xu, 2012, p. 52).
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1.2 Research Significance
The major significance of this research could be concluded as follows:
Firstly, the thesis is to make a research on Eileen Chang’s foreignization in her translation, which will contribute to researches on Eileen Chang’s translation work. The Old Man and the Sea translated by Eileen Chang was published in the 1950s and is the first Chinese version of Hemingway's masterpiece. In her version of The Old Man and the Sea, Eileen Chang uses a large number of foreignized elements, ranging from punctuation to sentence structure, which is influenced by the way of thinking of the English language. This makes her translation distinct from other latecomers. The style of the translation is very different, which constitutes a unique feature of her translation. Although many areas in Eileen Chang's translation have been touched upon in the research field, the phenomenon of foreignization has rarely been explored. Therefore, this thesis will examine foreignization in Eileen Chang's translation on the levels of words, syntax and culture to enrich researches about Eileen Chang’s translation work.
Secondly, the thesis will also explore the underlying reasons for the use of foreignized language in Eileen Chang's translation. The study is helpful for people to have a better understanding of Eileen Chang’s translation style and her unique foreignizing phenomenon in translation. During the May Fourth Movement, some scholars tried to promote a nationwide revolution in language to banish classical written Chinese from its dominant position and replace it with the vernacular Chinese. Whether in writing or foreign literature translation, they intended to imitate the style of Western languages and absorb their useful elements to enrich the vernacular, which was still rather backward in its system. Europeanized Chinese has formed a distinctive phenomenon of social language. Born out of the language background of this special era, Eileen Chang's creation must have been influenced by English or other European languages. Eileen Chang herself was born into a declining feudal family. She attended private schools and was deeply influenced by traditional culture. Later, she was sent to a church school by her mother and received a complete system of Western education. It can be seen that for Eileen Chang, against the background of either a big time or a small family, the collision of Chinese and Western cultures is everywhere to be seen. Based on this background and experience, her works show signs of foreignization.
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Chapter Two LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1 Definition of Foreignization
In the field of translation studies, foreignization (in contrast to domestication) is a translation strategy. It is also a moral attitude or a value proposition. Whether in the West or in the East, there have been discussions of foreignization and domestication as translation develops into a conscious and large-scale activity. Dictionary of Translation Studies (1997) published in the United Kingdom records that domestication and foreignization are terms frequently referred to by Venuti in 1995. They are directly derive from the famous German thinker Schleiermacher: “Either the translator leaves the writer alone as much as possible and moves the reader toward the writer, or he leaves the reader alone as much as possible and moves the writer toward the reader.” (Schleiermacher, 1813/1992, pp. 41-42) However, the definition of foreignization and domestication is first explicitly proposed by the American-Italian scholar Lawrence Venuti and the following definition is given: Foreignizing translation signifies the difference of the foreign text, yet only by disrupting the cultural codes that prevail in the target language. (Venuti, 1995, p. 20)
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2.2 Previous Studies of Foreignization in Literary Translation
2.2.1 Studies of Foreignization Abroad
Schleiermacher (1813) reads out a far-reaching translation monograph entitled über die verschiedenen Methoden des übersetzens at the academic seminar of the Royal Academy of Sciences in Berlin. Schleiermacher first classifies the translators according to different text types. In his opinion, there are mainly two types of translators: 1) Commercial text translator: a person who translates commercial texts; 2) Art text translator: a person who translates academic and artistic texts. (Mundy, 2012, p. 42) In fact, he also indirectly distinguishes two types of text. He believes that the second type of translation is more difficult and more creative because the language used in academic or artistic texts is closely related to the culture in which the text is rooted. It is almost impossible to find a complete and equivalent expression in the targeted language. Therefore, the problem faced by the translator boils down to how to coordinate the relationship between the original author and the target reader. He inclines to lead the target readers to the original author and tries to give the target readers the same impression as the original readers. Schleiermacher proposes such this pair of terms: “naturalizing” and “alienating”. To achieve the above-mentioned goals, the translator must adopt “alienating translation” to make the translation close to the original language and content and respect the heterogeneity in the foreign language text. Schleiermacher's dichotomy of “naturalizing” and “alienating” corresponds to Venuti’s concepts “domestication” and “foreignization”. Although their theories of the two translators have a certain relationship, Venuti’s concepts are different from the former, especially his foreignization strategy, not only in terms of language and content. Many external factors, such as politics, economic, society and culture are to be considered in the text.
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Chapter Three THEORETICAL FOUNDATION ........................................ 17
3.1 Definition of Foreignizing Translation .............................. 17
3.2 Translator’s Visibility ............................. 19
Chapter Four FOREIGNIZATION IN CHANG’S TRANSLATION ................. 29
4.1 Foreignization at the Lexical Level ............................ 29
4.1.1 Overuse of “De”(的) ............................... 29
4.1.2 Literal Translation of “An” and “A” ................................ 31
Chapter Five CONCLUSION ................................... 63
5.1 Major Findings ................................... 63
5.2 limitations ............................. 66
Chapter Four FOREIGNIZATION IN CHANG’S TRANSLATION
4.1 Foreignization at the Lexical Level
4.1.1 Overuse of “De”(的)
In English, adjective pronouns are commonly used before nouns, but there is no such habit in Chinese. When we know who they belong to by reading between the lines in the context, we usually do not point out the owner. But Eileen Chang’s translation goes against the language intuition of native speakers of Chinese every now and then. She translates that according to the grammar of English. This foreignizing phenomenon may sound a little lengthy and unnecessary to Chinese ears. For example:
Example 1: In the darkness he loosed his sheath knife and taking all the strain of the fish on his left shoulder he leaded back and cut the line against the wood of the gunwale.
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Chapter Five CONCLUSION
5.1 Major Findings
As a female writer with good bilingual ability and rich experience of living overseas, Eileen Chang’s translator identity is very special. In order to highlight the uniqueness of Eileen Chang’s version of The Old Man and the Sea which is different from other versions, this thesis selects the most popular version produced in the mainland of China, Wu Lao’s translation, as a reference. Eileen Chang and Wu Lao employ different translation strategies in translation. Eileen Chang’s version adopts foreignization as the main strategy while Wu Lao’s version takes domestication as the dominant method. In many cases, Eileen Chang translates sentences according to the original order, while Wu Lao often uses the domesticated way to change the original meaning into the traditional Chinese expressions. In handling of sentences, Eileen Chang usually retains the sentence structure and expressions.
From the analysis above, the author obtains some findings which are as follows:
Firstly, Eileen Chang adopts foreignization as the main translation strategy and retains the grammatical features and cultural heterogeneity of English. At the lexical level, many words are translated without making adjustments according to the target language context. Many unnecessary quantifiers, possessive pronouns and personal pronouns are preserved, which inevitably gives Chinese readers a feeling of unfamiliarity and redundancy. At the syntactical level, the structure and order of sentence elements in the source text are preserved to show the differences between the source and target languages. She arranges Chinese sentence elements by the laws of the syntactic structure of English, bringing foreignized features into the sentences of her version. The stacking of modifiers catches the eye of readers. Eileen Chang almost translates all modifiers as “……的” and these modifiers are put together without any integration. Another one is the sentence pattern of “是……的”. She translates the pattern of “S+V+P” into “是……的”. Although the original meaning is fully expressed, this kind of expression also strikes readers as strange and a little monotonous. In addition, for the sentences constructed with clauses juxtaposed or imbedded, Eileen Chang often retains the original order in arranging sentence elements. That puzzles readers a little about the logic within the sentence and increases the difficulty in understanding. Eileen Chang also introduces a Western symbol——dash. The use of dash brings both pros and cons. If used moderately, this symbol enriches the variety of expression. However, the overuse of it may end up interrupting the smooth flow of human thoughts.
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