Poetics Of Translation From The Perspective Of Feminism

Feminist translation theory witnesses great development after "cultural turn" in the 90s, which contributes to the development of the discipline itself. Yet at present most of the feminist translation researches are focused on the transference of "facts" of feminist literature and the reasons behind that transference. Few researches on the transference of formal elements have been seen according to the materials available to the writer of this thesis. Besides, scholars point out that in literary translation, "deceptive equivalence" may usually occur, which means that the translation only reflects the equivalent facts of the original text, while the formal operation which also constitutes the complete meaning of the whole literary text is ignored in the process of translating. This ignorance of formal operations thus leads to great loss of meaning in literary translation. As to the translation of feminist literature, the attentions paid to the formal operation of fictional text is especially important, because the mentioned formal operations, or the narrative strategies adopted by feminist writers, are of particular importance in creating meaning of the text with its purpose of rebelling against traditional narratives controlled by male writers. Thus, there exist some connections between feminist writing and poetics of translation, which make the research of poetics of translation from feminist perspective feasible.This research tries to explore the poetics of translation from the perspective of feminism through describing the recreation of the narrative strategies of the original into the target text, attempting to explain the reason for such recreation, and figure out how the translator's gender awareness affect the way he or she translates the feminist narrative discourse in the act of translation. The research takes the masterpiece of American feminist writer Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior, and the Chinese version of it, translated by Li Jianbo and Lu Chengyi, as literary texts for comparative analysis. The research tries to find out how the translators reproduce both the facts and formal operations into the target language and have the translated text still regarded as a typical feminist writing. The author of this thesis finds that in feminist literary translation, the translated text is faithful to the feminist ideas at the levels of both content and form, and gender awareness as well as knowledge of poetics is important factor that influences translator's decision-making. Gender awareness and knowledge of poetics can help translator more comprehensively understand the narrative discourse and its functions. In translating the literary text, translator literally transfers the narrative structure and narrative strategies of the original so as to achieve the equivalent function in the target literary system. In this way translation influences the literary system of receiving culture as an intermediate of introducing foreign feminist poetics.