A Study On Self-Translation Of Eileen Chang's Little Finger Up From Perspective Of Translator's Subjectivity

The short Chinese story Little Finger Up came into sight in 1944.Compared with Eileen Chang's early literary masterpieces,Little Finger Up seemed to be less attractive,but it was worth studying thanks to her incredible writing techniques.In1957,her English self-translation Little Finger Up was collected in The Orient Review and Literary Digest edited by Schenkman & Lal.However,few researches have been made on it and even no research has ever been done on it from the perspective of translator's subjectivity.Therefore,this thesis,on the basis of translator's subjectivity and with the help of corpus,attempts to study the self-translation of Eileen Chang's Little Finger Up in terms of passivity,subjective initiative and purposefulness(self-benefiting).This thesis mainly adopts the following research methods.First,the comparative analysis and textual analysis are conducted,through which the source text of Little Finger Up and its self-translation are compared in terms of translator's subjective initiative,passivity as well as self-benefiting by taking The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai conventionally translated by Eileen Chang and Conventionally-translated Texts in English literature as comparable texts.Second,the corpus-based method is employed with the aid of the corpus software Wordsmith Tools 6.0 and Antconc 3.2.4with a view to investigating how the translator exerts her subjectivity regarding types,tokens,type / token ratio(TTR),mean sentence length,high-frequency content words and punctuation frequency.The thesis,by making a detailed analysis of translator's subjectivity as revealed in Eileen Chang's self-translation of Little Finger Up,comes to the following conclusions.First,as the self-translator,Eileen Chang brings her subjective initiate into play in the self-translation in regard to sentence structure,proper nouns,culture-specific items,manifestation of the theme and way of expressing feelings.Second,privileged as she is,Eileen Chang is affected by both ideology and poetics.Eileen Chang deliberately eschews the sensitively political and warlike topic by way of omission and retains the heterogeneous elements of the source culture in the process of translation,reflecting her translator's subjectivity in the self-translation while suffering the passivity imposed by ideology and poetics.Third,Eileen Chang usually adopts various strategies in self-translation so as to fulfill her translation purposes,in which she deliberately deletes the plots and adapts the title so as to highlight the problem of Chinese marriage and reveal her own pessimistic attitude towards marriage,indicating her self-benefiting in self-translation.In a nutshell,the thesis holds that the self-translation seems to be concise and comprehensive as well as natural and unrestrained,indicating that the translator's subjectivity is much more involved in self-translation,compared with that in conventional translation.