Multifaceted Harmonization: A Feminist Approach Toward Eileen Chang's Translation Practice

As a talented writer featuring with image-creating and driving home sentiments, Eileen Chang made no small stirs in the Chinese literary arena. But her role as a bilingual translator for nearly 55 years off and on has been largely left obscured.Born into an old aristocratic family in Old Shanghai,educated in Hong Kong and lived most of her adulthood in the America, Chang's proficiency over the essence of the two polarizing cultures and her legendary life experience in heterogeneous civilizations have gave birth to her double cultural perspective and unique concern for gendered issues.Different from radical feminist translation theories in the west and the lukewarm feminist translation mainstream in domestic China, Eileen Chang exhibited her feminist translation poetics in the aesthetic pursuit of "multifaceted harmonization". Taking this as the starting point and from the feminist translation perspective, this thesis will explore how the legendary woman display her life imprints through harmonizing multifaceted factors in translation practice, namely, harmony between translator's subjectivity and female identity, harmony between creative betrayal and female experience, harmony between characterization and female images. Microscopically speaking, the thesis applies the method such as textual analysis, feminist criticism and comparative studies to the translated versions of The Old Man and the Sea and The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai when dealing with each aspect of Eileen Chang's humanizing pursuit.The first creative point of this thesis displays itself in text choice, namely, The Old Man and the Sea and The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai. According to feminist translation theory, female translators give prominence to their identity through the purposeful selection of either "ideologically friendly or unfriendly" texts and specific manipulation of interventionist strategies, such as supplementing, prefacing and footnoting, and hijacking. However, this thesis will highlights Eileen Chang's text choice off the beaten track, the balanced selection of "ideologically friendly text" The Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai featuring with feminine peculiarity as well as "ideologically unfriendly texts" The Old Man and the Sea advocating masculine heroism by male authors. As a breakthrough of mainstream text choice, Chang's transference of female sentiments into the tough man image stroke a wonderful balance between force and mercy. Moreover, the multifaceted sympathy for women's mental life between Chang and the author kept alive the simple and natural writing style of the novel and the bittersweet vicissitudes of ordinary women's life.The Second creative point of the novel is the emphasis on the importance of "female experience" in the interaction with translator's creative treason and reader-response orientation. Strolling among the three-dimensional space of female experience, namely the Wu dialect culture, the Mandarin Chinese culture as well as the western culture, Eileen Chang took the initiative to the adaptation of people's and places'names, the transformation of cultural metaphors and heterogeneous elements and the adjustment of original form and content, supplemented by her female sensitivity and creativity.Hopefully, the significance of this research includes the following:First, the thesis combines the translator's subjectivity with feminist translation theory which provides new perspective to the research of translating process, the role of translators, the subjectivity and creativity of the translators.Second, Eileen Chang's translation works with diversified and multifaceted harmony will serve as the unique reference for China's construction of polysystematic translation studies.Third, the comparative study of Eileen Chang's translated versions and her counterparts' may serve as the references for the literary translation and the preservation of differences between Chinese and western feminist translation theories.