Study On Translator’s Narrative Intervention In A Hero Born: The Legends Of The Condor Heroes Vol.1

A Hero Born,translated by Anna Homlwood,is the first volume of the English translation of Jin Yong’s classic work The Legend of Condor Heroes.Compared with other English translation of Jin Yong’s wuxia novels,it is successful not only in sales but also in readers’ feedback.This thesis aims to explore the “translator’s narrative intervention” in A Hero Born,which reflects from a narrative perspective the impact of translation shifts on the narrative of the novel,i.e.the distortions of the narrative text and shifts in the way the narrator tells the story.Corpus-based approach is adopted in this research.A parallel corpus with the source text(ST)and target text(TT)of A Hero Born(a total of 7,371 segments)is built,which covers207,608 Chinese characters and 124,269 English words.Then a segment-by-segment comparison between the ST and TT in the corpus is conducted to find out the translation shifts,which are then classified into different types and counted.According to the statistics,at the level of narration,the major manifestation of textual shifts is the deletion of various information in the TT,accounting for 17.53% of the ST.The deleted content fall into three major types: historical-cultural information,scene-descriptive information,and character-perceptive information.These shifts are found to have caused three types of shifts in the deeper “narrated text”,a term coined by Zhao Yiheng,including shifts in the reference to events,shifts in the causal relationship between actions and shifts in the speed of discourse time.At the deepest level,the pre-narrated text,only a few changes are caused by the translator’s intervention.In addition,narrative-element indicator words in the ST and TT are compared to identify different types of translation shifts.It is found that both speech and thought presentation in the TT show a tendency of moving to a freer mode of presentation,suggesting that the narrator’s interference in narrative has been weakened.Furthermore,a portion of narrator’s explanatory commentary is omitted in the TT,which reduces the narrator’s visibility.The afore-mentioned translator’s intervention has resulted in certain narrative effect.First,the textual shifts have produced more gaps and consolidated the network of response-inviting structure of the text.Second,shifts in characterization makes it more unstable and more open to interpretation.Last but not the least,the narrative flow is streamlined,making the story more compact and easier to read.From a macro perspective,the translator’s narrative intervention reflects the translator’s endeavor of modernizing and westernizing the novel to better cater to the western readers’ aesthetic expectations.