A Study On The Chinese Translation Of To Kill A Mockingbird From The Perspective Of Feminist Translation Strategies

In the middle and late 20 th century,the feminist movement developed in full swing.At the same time,since the 1980 s,the translation field has ushered in the era of “cultural turn”.The two waves collide with each other.Feminist translation theory emerges as the times require.It criticizes the situation where women and translation are placed at the bottom of society and literature,so as to improve the status of women and translation,and inject fresh blood into translation studies.Feminist translation theory breaks the shackles of traditional translation theory,redefines the relationship between the author and the translator,and reconstructs the faithfulness of the traditional translation theory.The main connotations of feminist translation theory include the embodiment of gender consciousness in translation,the redefinition of the relationship between the translated and the original,and the redefinition of the concept of faithfulness.To Kill a Mockingbird is the only full-length novel by Harper Lee,an American southern female writer,which won the Pulitzer prize in 1960.While revealing the racial,religious,class and other contradictions in southern American society,the novel also describes the growth of women in the new South.Many scholars have done a lot of meaningful researches on its translation from different perspectives,but few have done it from the perspective of feminist translation theory.There are six Chinese versions of To Kill a Mockingbird since1982.And among those translators,Gao Hongmei is the only female translator.Besides,among the male translators,there is no translator who explicitly expresses his feminist views,so the feminist translation theory is not applicable to the study of his translation.Therefore,this study chooses Gao Hongmei’s translation as the research object.From the unique perspective of feminism,this thesis takes the Chinese version of To Kill a Mockingbird(Gao Hongmei’s version)as the research object,attempting to find out the translation strategies that the female translator intentionally or unintentionally embodies in the literary translation.The specific translation strategies in feminist translation theory include the following three ways: adding the original text,hijacking,and adding preface and footnotes.This thesis selects many examples from Gao Hongmei’s Chinese translation and analyzes the translation strategies and skills embodied in her translation,in order to explore the applicability of feminist translation strategies in the translation of this novel.After a comparison of the original and Chinese translations,it is found that the strategies of supplementation,hijacking,and adding footnotes and the postscript are intentionally or unintentionally embodied in the Chinese translation.Firstly,in terms of words and sentences,it depicts female characters’ delicate psychology,adds positive descriptions of female characters,highlights the positive image of women,and reproduces the feminist consciousness of the original text.Secondly,it weakens the negative description of female characters and eliminates some discrimination against the negative female roles.Thirdly,it rewrites the obvious gender indicators in the original text,blurs the gender difference,and eliminates the binary opposition between male and female to some extent.Fourthly,it strengthens the shortcomings of the male roles,increases the descriptions of the environment of women being oppressed by the patriarchal society,and highlights the difficulty of women’s living environment.What’s more,formally,in terms of supplementing,there are seven kinds of supplementing in the translation: supplementing adjective,supplementing adverb,supplementing noun,supplementing adjective and noun,supplementing adjective and adverb,supplementing sentence,and supplementing word’s implicit meaning,among which the most frequent is supplementing adverb and supplementary word’s implicit meaning.In terms of hijack,there are seven kinds of hijack in the translation,namely,the omission of adjectives and nouns,omission of complete sentences,the omission of double quotation marks,the omission of nouns,the omission of adverbs,and rewriting,among which the most frequent is the omission of complete sentences and rewriting to achieve hijacking.And in adding footnotes and postscripts,complete sentences are added.