A Case Study Of The Translation Of The Modern Chinese Feminist Novel A Private Life

Feminist fiction is an important and indispensable part of contemporary Chinese literature. Its revolutionary linguistic experiments such as personalized writing and body writing have arrested attentions from critics and readers home and abroad. Besides these, modern Chinese feminist novels are also famous for its rebellion against traditional writing norm and its innovation in narrative, which creates great difficulty for the translator to render into English.This paper chooses a representative feminist novel A Private Life and its English translation as the object of study, to examine how the translator manages to express the peculiar characteristics of feminist novels in the target text. Research on the translation is mainly organized in two aspects:innovative and poetic linguistic features and creative use of narrative device. Through comparison and analysis between the original feminist fiction and its English counterpart, this study aims to find out how the translator dealt with the language and narration in feminist fiction, how translation reproduces its feminist ways of thinking and literary effects as well as what elements influence the success of translation.Data for this research consist of the Chinese version of A Private life by Chen Ran and its English translation rendered by John Howard-Gibbon. During the analysis, the researcher examined the source and target text from several aspects, including the feminist approaches to thinking, the theme of the story, the images of women and men construed, the narrative points of view as well as the artistic effects feminist writers intend to achieve.After careful examination and discussion, the researcher found that when confronted with textual and aesthetic experimentation of the gendered literature, the translator tends to neglect or weaken the original formal innovation and resort to much traditional and acceptable writing approaches to target text, which consequently hinders the transmission of feminist properties of the original text.This current study, standing astride Translation and Gender Studies, attempts to find out the problems existent in the translation of modern Chinese literature, to raise awareness as to the significance of the rendering of form in the translation of Chinese feminist literature. It is hoped that some of the findings in this essay will help to produce more effective translations of modern Chinese fiction with feminist significance in the future.