On Eileen Chang’s E-C Self-Translated Novel,Novella And Short Story From Bourdieu’s Sociological Perspective

Self-translation is a special translation phenomenon.Translating is a social activity and translators’ behavior,an indispensable part in it,such as the choice of source texts to be translated,translation strategies adopted and translation principle upheld can be inevitably affected by social factors.Therefore,translation studies should take into account the influence exerted by both in-textual and extra-textual factors on translation practice,so should self-translation.The sociology theory can perfectly offer a new perspective in self-translator research and it is conducive to studying the influence on translation practice in the socializing process and exploring the connections between subjectivity and objectivity.This study selects Eileen Chang’s three E-C self-translated works as the research objects,namely,the novel The Rice-sprout Song--Yangge,the novella The Rouge of the North--Yuannv and the short story Stale Mates--Wusiyishi.It attempts to summarize Chang’s inclination in her choice of works self-translated,translation principle upheld and translation strategies adopted.Based upon this,with Bourdieu’s sociology theory as the framework and three key concepts as the starting point,the thesis combs her social trajectory,the factors of field as well as the forms of capital she accumulates,interprets her translator habitus and analyzes the causes behind her translating behaviors.Research questions proposed in this thesis are:RQ1: How is Eileen Chang’s E-C self-translation influenced by capital and field?RQ2: What is the characteristic of Eileen Chang’s choice of texts for self-translation? How does her translation principle in E-C novel self-translation come into being?RQ3: What are the manifestations of Eileen Chang’s translator habitus in her translation strategies in E-C self-translation at the lexical,sentence and discourse level?The study first utilizes document reading and analysis to expound and elucidate Eileen Chang’s choice of texts to be self-translated and her translation principle upheld in the process and then employs textual analysis,document analysis,qualitative and quantitative methods to tentatively answer the third question.It is concluded that field and different forms of capital accumulated by Eileen Chang can exert influence on the initiation,production,transmission,and reception of her self-translated works.And the translator inclines to choose works to be translated based on ordinary Chinese people’s life,or those reflecting cultural elements in Chinese tradition.This is closely related to the translator’s attachment to her motherland and obsession with Chinese history and culture.In self-translation,the translator embodies obvious concern with readers’ expectancy,presents a “reader-centered” tendency,and always upholds the “Chinese culture-based” translation principle.As for the translation strategies at the lexical level,such as name and appellative addresses translation,literal translation is often used when the source text is purely English vocabulary.However,for the source text written in Wade-Giles Romanization,transliteration is often employed;if both are used,a strategy of transliteration plus literal translation is adopted.For color terms and sound words,literal translation is used when there exist corresponding expressions.Otherwise,different strategies will be employed based on various scenes.In view of Chinese culture-specific expressions,Chang often uses cultural filtering and omission in Chinese translations and simply translates cultural words only,taking readers’ expectancy into account.For the sentence-level translation,such as idioms and proverbs,the translator tends to adopt literal translation,and give full play to her subjective initiative to ensure that both the form and sense are equal.At the discourse level,a large number of information changes(additions)are made in the Chinese narrative translation,such as dialogues,appearance features,environmental descriptions,Chang considers the characteristics of traditional Chinese novel and its differences from English one,and she can also capitalize upon the advantages and strength of Chinese as the TL by adopting the strategy of explicitness change in some adaptations.The theoretical framework in the thesis is based on sociological theory,which helps to broaden the perspective of study on Eileen Chang’s self-translation and manifests certain complementary significance to previous studies.