"Thick Translation" In Strange Stories From A Chinese Studio

In the late20thcentury, the rapid development of cultural anthropology has brought afar-reaching influence on humanities. Among these anthropological branches, interpretiveanthropology, with the integration of hermeneutics and anthropology, has rendered a new perspectiveto translation practice and studies.According to Clifford Geertz, the founder of interpretive anthropology, what the anthropologistsdo is “thick description”, an interpretation of the cultural meaning behind the phenomenon and itssymbolic meaning in society (Geertz,1973:5-6). From the perspective of hermeneutics, translation isuniversally regarded as interpretation. What a translator does is the interpretation of the linguistic andcultural meanings of a source text. Kwame Anthony Appiah transplanted the term “thick description”to translation and named it "thick translation” due to the similar interpretative nature of anthropologyand translation. In translating African proverbs, it dawned upon him that “thick translation” hasspecial value in both teaching foreign literature and compensating for the loss of source culture intranslation, therefore, it is valuable for literary translation, especially in cultural globalization and thepropagation of Chinese literature.This thesis attempts to conduct a relatively comprehensive study of “thick translation” through acase study—Liaozhai and its English versions. This research tries to trace back the origin of “thicktranslation” to interpretive anthropology, and define it in the light of its intrinsic essence. Besides, thisresearch intends to find out the application and characteristics of “thick translation” in Herbert AllenGiles’ English version of Liaozhai, and its significance of thickly translating the novel through acomparative study between two versions by Giles and Yang Xianyi. By the detailed text analysis, it isdiscovered that there are three manifestations in Giles’ version, which includes preface, postscript,annotations and commentaries. And the characteristics of “thick translation” presented in thetranslation are as follows: interpretive nature; highlighting the similarities and differences betweensource culture and target culture in the translation; emphasis on translating the culture details andembodiment of translators’ subjectivity. Lastly, the comparative study shows that as a translationstrategy,“thick translation” is better in the view of cultural restoration and valuable in that byenriching and locating the translated text in a rich cultural and linguistic context, it can compensatefor the cultural reduction or omission of the original, facilitate the reader’s comprehension and acceptance of the translation, and promote the cultural dissemination. This research also shows that“thick translation” has some limitations concerning the proportion of thickness and adaptation. Whatthe research wishes to achieve in this study is some contribution to a comprehensive examination of“thick translation” as a valuable strategy in literary translation and its significance for thedissemination of classic Chinese literature and culture.