Self-Translation Of Pai Hsien-Yung’s Taipei People From The Perspective Of Translator’s Subjectivity

As a collection of short stories with broad social complexity and deep significance written by Pai Hsien-yung,Taipei People,ranking seventh among the top 100 Chinese fictions awarded by Asiaweek in 1999,is acknowledged as a modern classic.The self-translation of Taipei People has lost none of its power to move in English since its publication,and it turns out to be a successful example in the self-translation of the Chinese literature as well as a valuable case for translation studies.In fact,self-translation activity has enjoyed a quite long history.However,domestic scholars are rarely engaged in self-translation studies,and they usually attach great importance to the self-translated works of such distinguished writers as Lin Yutang and Eileen Chang rather than those like Pai Hsien-yung.Previous studies mainly focus on the comparative analysis between the self-translated version and the conventionally translated work selected from Taipei People and the translation strategies of Taipei People at the lexical level from a micro perspective.Few systematic and in-depth translation studies have been made on the self-translation of Taipei People as a whole from the perspective of translator’s subjectivity Therefore,based on the translator’s subjectivity and Chinese-English corpus with the help of text analysis software,this thesis intends to analyze Pai Hsien-yung’s self-translation of Taipei People from such three aspects as subjective initiative,passivity and purposefulness.After making a detailed analysis of translator’s subjectivity as revealed in Pai Hsien-yung’s self-translation of Taipei People,this thesis comes to the following conclusions.To begin with,Pai Hsien-yung is affected by the original,ideology,poetics and patron.With the support of the publishing house,the translator decides to translate Taipei People.He retains politically sensitive topics like war together with other heterogeneous elements of the source culture in the process of translation and adapts to the mainstream poetics of the target language by way of domestication,showing his strong passivity.In addition,Pai Hsien-yung brings his subjective initiative into play in the self-translation and shows his obvious intention of manipulating the target text in regard to sentence structure,linguistic features and paratext.Moreover,Pai Hsien-yung adopts such various translation strategies as addition,rewriting,annotation and conversion to serve his purpose of fully showing the content and form of the original text,and improving the readability of the translation and the acceptability of readers.All in all,it is found that the self-translation reproduces the original spirit and style to the greatest extent through obvious translator’s subjectivity.