Gladys Yang's Cultural Identity And Her Chinese-English Translation

Gladys Yang, a British translator, is one of the first few translators who translated Chinese into English. A lot of comments on her translation can be found in China and abroad. There is a lack of systematic study on either her translation activities or her personal backgrounds and the social context as far as the author knows. In the hope of bridging the gap, the author intends to conduct a descriptive study on Gladys Yang's life experience, the social context she worked in and her C-E translation so as to analyze the manifestation of her cultural identity. Employing cultural identity and polysystem theory from the social cultural point of view,this thesis will summarize tentatively the relationship between her translation strategies and her cultural identity, and discuss how she was able to achieve a balance between adequacy of the translation and acceptability of the TT in C-E translation.Polysystem theory and descriptive translation studies offer theoretical support for the study of translator's cultural identity. According to polysystem theory, translation activity is determined by the systems in the target culture. The translator's choice of source text and translation strategies unavoidably depends on the specific demands or norms in the target culture. Toury holds that translators can subject themselves to the norms realized in the ST or to the norms of the target culture or language. If it is towards the ST, then the TT will be adequate; if the target culture norms prevail, then the TT will be acceptable. Toury puts forward the confrontation of adequacy and acceptability. But Gladys's C-E translation achieves a balance between adequacy and acceptability, which shows that translation studies should not only focus on the texts of translation but also the context of translation as well as the translator's cultural identity formed in the intellectual, political, social, economic, ideological, or historical circumstances.According to Hall, Cultural identity can be defined as one shared culture, and it is"a matter of becoming as well as of being."It subjects to the play of history, culture and power. Rooted in western culture and deeply influenced by Chinese traditional culture, Gladys is inevitably of hybrid cultural identity. Her efforts to convey Chinese culture to English adequately exhibit her identification with Chinese culture; her consideration to make the translation acceptable to the West manifests her identification with the western culture. The thesis first introduces the definitions of cultural identity and hybrid cultural identity, then analyzes cultural identity from the perspective of the translator, which mainly includes her/his national identity, the period s/he lives in, educational background and her/his research field. It expounds Gladys's cultural identity from her source texts selection and her translation strategies in re-representing Chinese culture. At last, the thesis comes to the conclusion that Gladys's identification with Chinese culture surpasses that with western culture, so when Gladys was translating Chinese literature into English, she was in the position of helping China output literature to the English society rather than input Chinese literature for English society.