A Postcolonial Approach To The Hybridity In Eileen Chang’s Self-translation Of Jin Suo Ji

In the era of globalization, the communications between different nations and regions become more and more frequent, which contributes to the diversity of the world culture. And translation under this background will inevitably bear the imprint of both the source language culture and the target language culture, embodying remarkable hybrid characteristics. Hybridity in translation is an inevitable product of the cultural communications, which is helpful to manifest the otherness of different cultures and promote an equal communication between different cultures. The postcolonial translation theory focuses on the unequal power relations between different nationalities and cultures, providing the theoretical basis for the research on the hybridity in translation. And Postcolonial translation scholars hold that translation can either be the conspiracy of the colonists and imperial expansion or become a useful tool to fight against the cultural hegemonies and ethnocentrism depending on its different translation purposes and strategies.Jin Suo Ji is one of the most famous works created by Eileen Chang, a famous female writer in Chinese modern literature and was reputed as the greatest novelette in Chinese literature since ancient times. Its English version was translated by Eileen Chang herself after several failures in rewriting and was collected in Twentieth-century Chinese Stories edited by Professor Hsia C.T. in 1971. When translating Jin Suo Ji, Eileen Chang employed foreignization as main strategy to express the artistic value of the source text, while employing domestication as supplementary strategy to deliver the basic information of the source text, which manifests obvious hybridity in translation.Based on the above discussion, this paper aims to explore the hybridity in Eileen Chang‘s self-translation of Jin Suo Ji and reveal its cultural and literary values as well as implications to the present cultural exchange between China and the west in light of the postcolonial translation theory. To further analyze the features of hybridity in The Golden Cangue, this thesis will mainly answer the following three questions: What hybridity features are there in Eileen Chang‘s self-translation of Jin Suo Ji? What translation strategies did Eileen Chang adopt to make The Golden Cangue a hybrid translation? And what implications can we get for literary translation by analyzing Eileen Chang‘s self-translation of Jin Suo Ji?In the process of collecting and analyzing the data, 170 examples are selected from The Golden Cangue at random to make a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the research text. In order to make the study easy to handle, the 170 examples are divided into three types according to the Han Ziman‘s classification of the hybridity feature, namely, hybridity in literary norms, linguistic hybridity as well as cultural hybridity to analyze the hybridity in The Golden Cangue. After a careful discussion and analysis, the present research finds that Eileen Chang‘s self-translation of Jin Suo Ji manifests obvious hybridity in literary norms, linguistics and cultures. And Eileen Chang adopted foreignization as main strategy and domestication as supplementary strategy in her translation, by which she not only effectively delivered the important information of the source text but also made her translation full of exotic flavor, making it a hybrid translation. Last but not the least, by analyzing Chang‘s translation of Jin Suo Ji, the research finds that hybridity indeed plays a crucial role in promoting the cultural communications, resisting cultural hegemonies and optimizing the target language culture. Through hybridity, the ideology of the weak culture can enter the strong culture, and then makes the readers of the strong culture realize that there exist some other cultures in the world and the strong culture can thus be influenced.The present study has some enlightenment for the English translation of the Chinese literary works. Hybridity has a positive role in resisting cultural hegemonies and the ethnocentrism as well. When translating from the weak culture to the strong one, the translator has to take full consideration of the degree of hybridity. It is not proper to pursue hybridity only by means of foreignization and especially radical foreignization. Only by moderate hybridity can the translator make his or her translation achieve the due effect.