A Sociolinguistic Perspective To The Translation Of Sexual Discourse In Sha Fu

Sexual discourse is abundantly present in world literature,while research on its translation is quite limited and has been mostly restricted to discussion on its sensitivity and the influence of social ethics and translators’ self-censorship on translation decisions.Far too little attention has been paid to the social attributes of sexual discourse and social motives behind related linguistic choices and no research has been found to make a systematic analysis of the translation of sexual discourse from the perspective of sociolinguistics.In view of this,the thesis aims to provide a new approach to translation practice and research on sexual discourse by analysing the sexual discourse translation in Sha Fu,one of the famous novels written by Li Ang,based upon the social attributes of sexual discourse and sociality of translation activities.The linguistic variation theory,one of the most fundamental branches of sociolinguistic theories,studies the relationships between variations and society.Since sociolinguists see translation as a social activity,translation under the linguistic norms of both the source society and the target society will inevitably involve analysis of linguistic variations.The thesis explores major influencing factors of linguistic variations in sexual discourse and categorizes them into two types: factors of social identity and factors of context.In the analysis of specific social factors,the author examines the characteristics and shortcomings of the English translation.It is pointed out that only by fully understanding the social considerations of sexual discourse in the original text can its function be fully reproduced in translation.