A Comparative Study Of Three Chinese Versions Of The Bell Jar From The Perspective Of Feminist Translation Theory

After the1980s, great changes have taken place in the field of translationstudies due to the surge of that age—“cultural turn”. Many researchers of translationcombined feminism with translation studies, which further formed the school offeminist translation. Feminist translation theory has not only broadened the sphere oftranslation studies, overturned the traditional translation ideas, but also provided aunique gender perspective for the study of subjectivity of translators. Therefore, thevitality of feminist translation theory has got enhanced.Scholars in western countries began to study feminist translation theory at avery early time, and had already made fruitful achievements, which laid a solidfoundation for the following translation studies. And in the practical manipulation oftranslation, feminist translators tried to translate from women’s perspective, whichwas regarded as a weapon to attack patriarchal society. While in China, after beingintroduced by Zhu Hong in the last century, feminism received very little attention atfirst. But later on, with the ceaseless development, more and more scholars havebegun to find the research useful and necessary and all devoted themselves to thestudy of the relationship between translation and feminism.On the basis of the previous studies, the thesis aims to compare and analyzethree Chinese versions of The Bell Jar, an autobiographical novel of famous feministSylvia Plath, from the perspective of feminist translation. Three translators are ZhuShida (male), Yan Weiming (male), and Yang Jing (female) respectively. As the onlynovel of Plath, The Bell Jar was born against the background of feminism. It fullyreflects her outlook on language, gender and the view of life-and-death. In addition,this is an American women growth novel, in which large amounts of feministconsciousness and language features are available for analysis and comparison.Therefore, it is admitted that The Bell Jar is well worth being analyzed andcompared from the perspective of feminist translation. The present author operatesthe three Chinese versions from both the linguistic level and feminist ideology level respectively. From the linguistic level, such words as sentence final particles, hedges,intensifiers are frequently used by women translators. And they also prefer to useinterrogative sentences, phrases with long pre-modifiers and dashes. While from thefeminist ideology level, women translators seem to be better at understanding thepsychology of women characters in the original text and are able to appropriatelycatch the changes of sentiments in their inner world. Meanwhile, in the process oftranslation, in order to improve women’s status, women translators often choose toomit the words related with sex or emotions given by men. Anyway, all the threeChinese versions can present the images of men without any strong subjectivity ordistortion. After detailed comparative analysis, it can be seen that all the threeChinese versions have not expressed the feminist spirit in the original textcompletely. But comparatively speaking, Yang Jing’s version is better than the othertwo versions. What’s more, some defects of the three Chinese versions are probablydue to the influence of that age, ideology of the public and specific requirements ofpublishing houses.In conclusion, feminist translation theory can help to understand the issues ofgender differences appearing in the process where translators of different sexmanipulate the original text. It has played a very important role in translation studies.And as a potential research angle, it is necessary to apply gender perspective intomany more related researches so as to yield more fruitful results.