Value-Specific Genre And Translations: Cultural Fractures Reconsidered

Martial-arts fiction, also termed kung-fu novels, is known to modern Chinese readers as "wuxia xiaoshuo", which means "martial-chivalric novels" when literally translated. It has a long history that can be dated back to the Tang Dynasty (AD 618-907). It is one of the few surviving forms of Chinese literacy, which can claim a direct link with traditional popular literature. And the genre has a large Chinese readership from all social strata. Although martial-arts-themed books, detective stories, movies, and related culture have made an impact in the West since the 1960s, the translation of martial-arts fiction into English began only in the 1990s. The first such translation was published in 1991. Among all the translation works, Louis Cha's masterpieces are widely chosen by the translators. The biggest reason is that Louis Cha has been generally considered as a master of martial-arts fiction, and among all the martial-art novelists, he has perfectly displayed the charm and spirit of traditional Chinese culture in his works.Translation Studies, a new appearance in academia, has been observed against a much broader context associated with culture, and it has come to be characterized by cultural turn, theoretical permeation, and interdisciplinary integration. Translation studies in cultural perspectives aims at cleaning a way out of the endless contention among various translation approaches. In the process of translating, the translation strategies and cultural choices are based on the translator's own beliefs and values. In other words, subjective interpretations have been allowed for a foreign culture while involved in the introduction of the source culture into the target culture, acculturation or cultranslation. The focus of the present study, then, is more on intercultural translation than interlingual translation.Just because the cultural turn has come to be one of the three features of the present Translation Studies, this paper, therefore, is intended to deal with the subject of translation from the perspective of cultural studies, on the basis of an empirical insight into the translations of The Book and the Sword. This paper is trying to throw a light on the cultural fractures between the martial-arts genre and the translated work...