| Nieh-Tzu is the only full-length novel by Taiwanese writer Pai Hsien-yung,and the first literary work with male homosexuals as its subject in the history of modern and contemporary literature in China.Since its publication,the novel has attracted widespread attention and has been translated into several languages and released overseas since 1990,with its English version completed by the renowned sinologist Goldblatt.The novel portrays images of the underprivileged male homosexuals in Taipei in the 1970 s.The culture involved in Nieh-Tzu includes not only the homosexual subculture that exists across the world,but also the Chinese culture with regional characteristics.However,by scrutinizing the research available,the author discover that little attention has been paid to the English version of Nieh-Tzu at home and abroad,and there is gross imbalance between the study of the original text either in research quantity and perspective.Moreover,most of the studies are limited to the analysis of isolated words,without delving into the broader context of the novel’s themes and literary style.As a result,these studies overlook the importance of contextual factors and fail to fully appreciate the unique textual value of the novel as a whole.A close reading and comparison reveal that in addition to the theme,the religious imagery,sexually suggestive language,appellations of characters and reduplicated words featured in the original text have been rewritten in the English translation,and the reasons behind them are worth exploring.In view of this,this thesis takes Nieh-Tzu and its English version Crystal Boys as the research object,analyzes the translation with the guidance of Lefevere’s rewriting theory and focuses on the two major factors,ideology and poetics.It is found that,influenced by ideology,the translator mainly adopts domestication by replacing the Buddhist imagery in the original text with Christian concepts and making sexually suggestive language explicit or omitting them,making the novel more accessible and acceptable to Western readers,but may hinder the readers’ understanding of the social context depicted in the original text;poetics influences the translation of reduplicated words and appellations,and the translator mainly adopts domestication and rewrites the theme to some extent. |
