Contrastive Analysis Of The Chinese Versions Of The Color Purple From Feminist Translation Theory

With the development of the feminist movement in the west, feminist theory has aroused strong repercussion in academic circle. The famous "culture turn" excites the combination of feminist and translation, which forms the influential feminist translation theory. Feminist translation theory regards translation as a political behavior of manifesting women's identities and the tool of striving for women's position. It focuses on studying translation from the perspective of gender, emphasizes male and female translator's differences and attempts to reveal the relationship between gender differences and translation.The Color Purple is a salable feminist novel, which is very popular in different colors, ranks and countries. It is translated into Chinese successively by four translators with different gender and has great influence in the translation field. The author selects two of the Chinese versions to contrast and analyze:one is translated by a male translator Yang Renjing and the other is a female translator Tao Jie's version, and puts forward two questions as follows:①For the same original work, do the female and male translator's versions embody gender differences?②If the answer is yes, if it means women's version reflects more feminist consciousness? Does male translator have the tendency of ignoring or constraining women's voice? For above questions, based on the original, the author selects fifty-five pieces sample texts from the two versions (Yang Renjing's and Tao Jie's) with obvious differences under the feminist translation theory, and analyzes them in detail from the following four aspects:the prefaces of the two translators, narrative feature, the depiction of the figures and the sex depictions under the perspective of the feminist translation theory.The findings of the research are as follows: ①There do exist gender differences in the two renderings, generally speaking, female translator Tao Jie's feminist consciousness is stronger than male translator Yang Renjing's;②Tao Jie manipulates her version subjectively from a female's perspective and her special life experience, while male translator adopts the derogatory words to depreciate women's identities and positions;③Besides, there really exists the phenomenon of ignorance and suppression women's voice in Yang Renjing's version;④To the sex depictions in the novel, both versions embody gender consciousness though male translator makes women's bodies be "heard", Tao Jie presents a stronger feminist consciousness in her version. Furthermore, the author also finds that Tao Jie is occasionally influenced by the patriarchal thoughts when she consciously adopts the feminist translation strategies to show her feminist consciousness in her version and does her best to discover and disclose the feminist traces in the original.