On The Chinese Translation Of Red Star Over China: A Perspective Of Textless Back-translation

In the framework of the theory of textless back-translation,this thesis takes the Fushe version organized by Hu Yuzhi(thus also called Hu’s version)and Dong Leshan’s version published by Joint Publishing Company of Xi Xing Man Ji as the subject of study.Starting from the three standards of language,culture,and style,this thesis compares the differences between the two versions and analyzes the reasons for such differences.Red Star Over China is the masterpiece of Edgar Snow,a famous American journalist.It is a reportage work of Chinese stories written in English,with a beautiful writing style and strong documentary features.It is known as the “classic encyclopedia” for studying the Chinese revolution.The author truly records what he has seen during field interviews in the Revolutionary Basement of Northwest China from June to October 1936,and truly reports to the world the situation of the Communist Party of China and the Red Army of the Workers and Peasants,as well as many Red Army leaders and generals.The Communist Party and the Chinese Revolution made objective assessments and made fair reports to the world.The above characteristics reflect the unique literary value of the work.Therefore,the importance of Red Star Over China is self-evident.However,domestic research on this work still has a big shortage,which needs more in-depth research as a supplement.The textless back-translation was originally “rootless back-translation”,which was first put forward by Professor Wang Hongyin based on the special case of novel Moment in Peking and its Chinese translation.(Wang Hongyin,2009)It was later modified into textless back-translation,which was then evolved into a new translation theory.The main purpose of this thesis is to solve the cultural problems encountered in the translation of native-culture works written in foreign languages.After that,Professor Wang Hongyin proposed specific evaluation criteria for textless backtranslation,which could be divided into three aspects: language,style,and culture.This thesis firstly introduces the research status of back-translation,textless backtranslation and Chinese translations of Red Star Over China.Secondly,it is the theoretical basis of this thesis,including the definition of textless back-translation,main concepts of textless back-translation,and the applicability of textless back-translation.Then,a comparative analysis is made on the two versions from three aspects under the framework of textless back-translation.At the linguistic level,this thesis studies the language styles of the two translations from the two perspectives of direct speech and general texts.On the cultural level,this thesis studies the translation methods of culturerelated texts in the two versions from the perspective of folk culture and historic culture.On the stylistic level,texts involved with rules,lyrics and newspapers and periodicals are analyzed respectively,and the corresponding stylistic organization forms in the two translations are compared.The results show that the two versions present different effects.In terms of linguistic level,Dong’s translation is more similar to idiomatic Chinese,which is more authentic and fluent.In terms of cultural level,Hu’s translation prefers literal translation and does not break the shackle of the original text.Dong’s translation prefers free translation,which is more authentic and natural and well reflects that the culture of the translation should be naturalized in the direction of the culture of the target language.In terms of stylistic level,Hu’s translation tends to be literal and closely follows the sentence pattern of the original text,while Dong’s translation applies free translation,keeping the stylistic type and taste of the original text and corresponding to it.Through analysis,it is concluded that there are three reasons for the difference between the two versions.First,the two versions are at different times.Second,the time allowed for the translators to do preparation work was different.The third is due to the different cultural identities of translators.