On The Reconstruction Of Female Images From The Perspective Of Imagology

In recent years,translation from Chinese into foreign languages has become the main focus in the field of translation studies and research on this subject has witnessed a rapid increase.One of the research topics has attracted increasing attention from the field of translation studies—the construction and reconstruction of images in translations.Translators,replacing the authors of the original works,become the new image creators in translations.Therefore,translators can modify the images in the translation to achieve certain goals,such as promoting cultural exchanges among certain countries.Thus,the number of interdisciplinary studies involving both translation studies and imagology has increased gradually.However,most of these interdisciplinary studies only focus on the hetero-images in translations.The auto-images in translations have not been paid enough attention to.Hence,studies of auto-images need to be supplemented and deepened.The thesis offers a descriptive and comparative study of the reconstruction of autoimages in the English translation of the Beijing opera Hongzongliema,Lady Precious Stream from the perspectives of imagology and translation studies.The research framework of this thesis is designed as follows:According to Pageaux’s analytical framework,the case study consists of two parts:intrinsic analysis and extrinsic analysis(巴柔,2001).First of all,the intrinsic analysis discusses the variations between the female images in the Beijing Opera Hongzongliema and in the English translation Lady Precious Stream on a textual level.Secondly,based on the results of intrinsic analysis,the extrinsic analysis discusses the possible factors that had an impact on the reconstruction of images in the translation.The extrinsic analysis assumes that the translator is mainly affected by two factors:the western society’s collective imagination of Chinese and the translator’s social environment.The preliminary conclusions of this research are stated as follows:There are three kinds of reconstructed female images in the translation: brave women,wise women,and respected women.The reconstruction of images is resulted in the rewritings such as adding,deleting and modifying the plots in the translation.The thesis finds that the westerners’ social collective imagination of the Chinese was negative.Since Western society had already lost interest in knowing more about China since the 19 th century,there is a great discrepancy between westerners’ imagination of the Chinese and China’s status quo.Besides,based on the experiences of Hsiung,the thesis discovers that he attached great importance to the audience’s acceptance.Thus,Hsiung had done a lot of rewritings to accommodate to the mainstream values in western societies,which resulted in the reconstruction of the images of Chinese female characters.