Study On The Translation Of Homosexuality In The Chinese Versions Of The Color Purple

The Color Purple is a1982epistolary novel by American author Alice Walker. As the dual winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction, The Color Purple has become a literary canon in the western world of feministic literature and claimed a high status in American homosexual literature. The novel has been translated into different languages and turned out to be successful as well as controversial. It was later adapted into a film and musical of the same name.After translated into Chinese, this book has gained a larger readership in China, but the comments and studies on its content and theme are quite different home and abroad. One of the most obvious differences is the relationship between Celie and Shug. While most readers of the original book consider the two women in a homosexual relationship, those of the Chinese versions mostly talk about them as sisters.In this paper, the author compares one English version and three Chinese versions mainly by analysing the paratexts including prefaces and footnotes in different versions, interviews with the translators, related articles written by the translators, and the presentation of the relationship in the main story, trying to explain why the relationship is interpreted so differently in China and the West. The research is done from two major perspectives, which are translator’s subjectivity under the influence of gender consciousness, and the ideological and poetic power beyond control of translators in Chinese context.The author focuses on different presentations of homosexual relationship between Celie and Shug in different versions, and then tries to give a justifiable explanation on the differences with feminist translation theory and manipulation theory.The author makes clear that as lesbian feminism is an important part of feminist movement, and as the novel is a feminist work written by an advocator of feminism, the homosexual part should be meaningful in the book, in the literary world, and even in the whole feminist movement. However, under the influence of both translators’subjectivity and social and cultural factors which translators are not able to control, homosexuality has to be adapted to Chinese context. Poetics and ideology, as well as translators’feminist consciousness, influence the process and result in the final product of translation.