On The Translation Of China Men From Postcolonial Perspective

With the cultural turn and postcolonial turn in translation studies, the ideal of complete equivalence in traditional translation studies is negated. Postcolonial approaches to translation shift to inspect the exterior and macro factors influencing the act of translation. According to postcolonial translation theory, the relationship between the source text and the target text is unequal. Translation activity is greatly affected and controlled by the imbalanced relation between the strong power and weak power. This thesis discusses translation in the postcolonial context influenced by power differentials, focusing on disproportionate translations, writing, selection of texts to translate and adoption of different translation strategies.Taking China Men, the representative work of Chinese American women writer Maxine Hong Kingston, as a case study, this thesis analyzes how the power differentials between a hegemonic culture and a dominated culture manipulate the employment of domestication and foreignization in the postcolonial context. This Chinese American literary work is a typical postcolonial writing, which distinguishes itself from both the mainstream American literature and marginal Chinese literature of its time as a clear-cut Chinese American culture that interweaves Chinese culture with American culture, and even develops its own Chinese American culture in the process of absorbing and abolishing the two cultures. On one hand, Maxine Hong Kingston’s depiction of the exotic and ethnic Chinese stories to the other cultures assists her to find a position in the multi-cultural American society. On the other hand, for being separated from Chinese social environment, her description of Chinese stories under the cover of traditional Chinese culture is incomplete, fragmented, and even distorted in some sense.Based on the postcolonial translation theory, the thesis makes a cultural analysis of the source text and examines translation strategies adopted through a comparative study of two different Chinese versions. The finding demonstrates the main dominance of domestication strategy and rare use of foreignizing approach in the process of translating China Men into Chinese. Their domesticated translation of Chinese cultural symbols conforms to the target language, whereas some deviations are also made in the translating process. And accordingly, foreignization strategy, which is less used, enables Chinese readers to sense the exotic flavor. But the foreignized translation causes confusion in the target readers and contaminates the purity of Chinese culture. In view of this, neither domestication nor foreignization can deal with the Chinese American literature translation with satisfaction. Hence, a third way "hybridization" is proposed to solve the conflicts among various cultures and languages in the translating process. As postcolonial theory concerns about differentials and diversity, the present study appeals for embracing foreignized and hybridized translations to keep the heterogeneity of different discourses, which makes different cultures involved with each other on an equal basis, thus promoting exchange and convergence. In a narrow sense, evaluation and implication concluded above may enlighten translators with appropriate translation strategies from postcolonial perspective. In a broad sense, this study on Chinese American literature translation extends the range and deepens the scope of postcolonial translation study and cultural study in a great degree.