A Report On The Textless Back Translation Of The Chinese Nail Murders (Excerpts)

This thesis is a translation report on the English to Chinese translation of Chapter2-7 of The Chinese Nail Murders.The novel is one of the books in Judge Dee Mysteries,the Chinese gong'an(detective)series,written in modern English by Robert Hans van Gulik,a Dutch diplomat and sinologist.Set in imperial China(Tang Dynasty),it was composed based on historical figure Di Renjie,county magistrate and statesman of a fictional district by imitating Ming-Qing gong'an genre.In academia of translation studies,however,the opinions towards this special translation phenomenon are divided somewhat.To be specific,it is named by different scholars with different terms,such as “back translation,” “translation restoration,”“cultural back translation,” “cultural restoration” and so forth.In 2015,Professor Wang Hongyin finally named this special translation type as “textless back translation” after having it developed and revised as a universal translation theory.According to Professor Wang,The Chinese Nail Murders belongs to “non-native language writing,” and its translation belongs to “textless back translation.”Having found that the studies on Judge Dee Mysteries is far from enough,the author of this thesis holds that one possible reason lies in the Chinese translation of Judge Dee Mysteries.Since this series of books was translated by Chen Laiyuan and Hu Ming in the 1980 s,their translation has been very well-received and even often been mistaken as the original works by the Chinese reader.The harsh truth is that no matter how well the translation has been received,it differs greatly from the original by the translators' abridging,rewriting and adding to a large extent for subjective and objective reasons.Therefore,the author of this thesis thinks it is of great value,either in the academic studies or the translation practice,to retranslate Judge Dee Mysteries.The author is willing to make the first attempt to adopt the textless back translation theory to guide her translation of The Chinese Nail Murders,and in turn apply it to evaluate the quality and effectiveness of the translation,in hopes of proving how well this theory serves in guiding the translation of this kind ofliterature written in a non-native language,thus helping to bring more attention on this newly-created theory to have it further studied and driving the translators to translate the same kind of literature under the guidance of textless back translation theory.In the end,the author does hope her translation and translation report may help Judge Dee Mysteries earn more attention,more importantly,inspire(if possible)the real passion and enthusiasm of some translators to retranslate this series of books.