| The “cultural turn” as a breakthrough in translation researches which started in the 1990 s manifested interdisciplinary and globalized characteristics. More and more scholars and researchers have contributed to broadening the traditional views through the discussions of the importance of translation from different perspectives. As one of the important branches, feminism emphasized on rewriting from feminist perspective and constructed female gender identity. Thus, feminist translation was generated for the sake of the similarities between feminism and translation. Feminist translation theory aims at expressing a unique feminine aesthetic perspective during the translation process and manipulating the textual production with experimental political intentions to make an achievement of redefining the relation between translator and author identity, translation and original. It also aims at creating a unique female language system through new spellings, grammar structures, new images and metaphor to reestablish translators’ subjective identity in the cross-lingual practice. Feminist thought entered into china in the 1990 s and influenced its translation researches in 2002.Thus, the Chinese scholars have paid more and more attention on the relations between feminism and translation and realized the necessities and practicability of feminist translation researches and practice under Chinese contexts.The paper focuses on the American female writer Kate Chopin’s short novel—The Awakening and makes a comparative analysis on its two Chinese versions from Yang Yingmei and Wen Zhongqiang.The Awakening is the first successful novel in its aesthetic value written by the American female writer. It states female’s self- assertiveness and self-seeking from a brand-new view which manifests the intensified feminist consciousness not only in the original text but also in the Chinese versions. The paper tries to make a generalization and analysis on the original and the two Chinese versions at linguistic level and feminist ideological level from feminist perspective with the help of some comments related to the novel. At the level of linguistics, the female translator would be prone to be properly in the option of words and structures using dialects, intensifiers and verify the female characteristics by applying euphemism and exclamatory and interrogative sentences meanwhile omitting the rude words. At the level of feminist ideology, the female translator would appropriately reveal female’s unique sensitivity during the translation by keeping metaphors and female experience in the original, highlighting the female identity of the work and translator’s subjectivity. With the influence of feminist consciousness, the female translator would rewrite the words criticizing female sexuality and emotions in the original in male’s view and made the male’s image feminine. Besides, textual manipulation by adding female ideology would also be involved to get a better interpretation of female writer’s textual purpose.The analysis shows that the female translator would be better to verify feminist consciousness, experiences in diction and syntactic structures and convey the textual purpose under the influence of feminist ideology, target language readers and publishers. While the male translator would be more likely to be faithful to the original and be influenced by the traditional social ideology.The male translator would be inevitable to be marked with androcentric bias even though he wanted to show feminist consciousness during translation process.In summary, the interrelation between feminist and translation would challenge to the traditional social gender sexism, bring the brand new perspective to translation and reveal translator’s subjectivity.The feminist translation theory highlighting female identity and difference would promote the development of diversification and globalization of contemporary translation theories during the intercultural communication. |
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