Strategies In Two Chinese Translations Of The Sun Also Rises: A Systemic Comparison

With the constant globalization and localization of economy,culture and literature in the contemporary age,the practice of English-Chinese literary translation has been developing steadily.In particular,since its publication in English,at least 22 Chinese versions of Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises have been published.Due to certain partial,closed and static approaches to translation,however,English-Chinese literary translation practice is now still suffering from a tendency of arbitrarily adopting strategies without a consideration of text-context relationships.Meanwhile,with the continuous expansion of present-day translation studies,the study of English-Chinese literary translation has been prospering.Within it,the study of the Chinese translation of Hemingway’s novels has made prominent achievements.Due to the complexity of English-Chinese literary translation study and the diversity of research approaches,however,English-Chinese literary translation research is still handicapped by a tendency of partially studying translation strategies without considering the relationships between text and context.In view of the accomplishments and problems in the practice and research of English-Chinese literary translation especially the translation of Hemingway’s novels,in the light of the Dialectical Systemic Philosophy of Translation,on the basis of Lawrence Venuti’s theory of domesticating and foreignizing translation,and via an incorporated methodology combining quantitative and qualitative analysis,the present study aims to systemically compare the strategies adopted in the two Chinese translations of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises,i.e.,Zhao Jingnan’s and Lv Yuan’s translations,on the lexical,phrasal and sentential levels,and systemically compare the contextual factors of the two translations so as to describe and explain the similarities and differences in their strategies.Results of the study demonstrate that though Zhao’s and Lv’s translations adopt both domesticating and foreignizing translation on the levelsof word,phrase,and sentence,Zhao’s translation tends to mainly adopt domestication whereas Lv’s tends to chiefly adopt foreignization.The similarities and differences in the use of strategies in the two translations are the results of the influence of the translators’ personalities,the characteristics of the intended readers,the features of socio-cultural backgrounds,and other factors of the two translations.This study may be both practically and academically meaningful to the Chinese translation of Hemingway’s novels in particular and English literary works in general.Practically,this study may help to improve English-Chinese literary translation practice by avoiding the tendency of adopting strategies regardless of the relationship between text and context.Academically,it may compensate for the inadequacy in the study of English-Chinese literary translation by decreasing the tendency of studying translation strategies without considering text-context relationships.