A Study On The Characteristics Of Eileen Chang's Translation Of The Old Man And The Sea

Though Eileen Chang's effort as a translator has been recognized for the recent years, translation studies concerning about her still seem superficial, most of which centralize on piecing together her lifelong translation works and on her self-translation or Wu dialect-to-mandarin translation phenomenon. We can hardly find any detailed studies on her translation works of American literature. The Old Man and the Sea is one of the most important translation works of Eileen Chang when she was the employee of Hong Kong, U.S News Press in 1952, and also Chang's version is the first Chinese version of this masterpiece in China. We can currently find more than 20 Chinese versions of this book since it was introduced into China, among which the versions translated by Hai Guan, Wu Lao, Huang Yuanshen and Li Xiyin are well-known and widely read. However, as the first translated Chinese version of this book, Chang's version is not received as it is deserved. It is undoubtedly a blank that we need to fill in not only for the translation studies of the book but also for the further study of Eileen Chang as a translator.This paper focuses on researching Eileen Chang's version while versions of Hai Guan and Wu Lao are used as our reference of comparison. Through detailed and careful textual comparison and analysis, we would like to explore the characteristics of Chang's version mainly in the following three aspects: emotion expression, culture translation and language style. in Chapter 1, we would show how Chang's personal emotions infiltrate in the characters of the book and their relationship in between, how she understands and interprets the interaction between the old man and big fish, and what she has revealed in her version as a female translator; in Chapter 2, we mainly focus on how Chang deals with those cultural-loaded textual matters. In Chang's version, matters of religion in the source text (ST) are exceedingly highlighted in both her translated text and preface due to her employment in Hong Kong, U.S News Press. Plus, in order to facilitate the readers, Chang domesticated in her version some of the exotic cultural matters and made some amendments and additions as she thought necessary; finally in Chapter 3, by careful textual analysis of the three versions, we would like to explore the characteristics of Chang's version in the aspects of wording, sentence structuring and cohesion. Through the analysis of the above three aspects, the value of Chang's translation is further confirmed.