| As an important literary work in China,the classical Chinese novel“Jin Ping Mei”has received widespread attention for a long time.The American scholar David T.Roy spends more than thirty years completing the English translation of the whole novel.Roy translates all the contents in the source text and adds copious paratexts,which equips Roy’s rendition with distinctive paratext features.This paper focuses on the paratexts of Roy’s translation and mainly analyzes how Roy gives play to his subjectivity in it.Firstly,the thesis makes a general description of the paratexts,including the titles,the cast of characters,the introduction,and the annotations.Through the comprehensive analysis,the author finds that the paratexts in Roy’s translation have distinctive academic features.Roy accurately translates the novel title and all chapter titles,and adds five volume titles in his translation.There are a large number of items in the cast of characters and all the characters are introduced in detail.As for the introduction in Roy’s translation,it is very long and comprehensive.Roy makes a comprehensive academic interpretation of Jin Ping Mei in it,which makes the introduction read like an academic paper.The annotation in Roy’s translation is so extensive and can be divided into annotations for tracing,annotations for culture,and annotations for illustration.Based on the statistics,there are a large proportion of tracing and culture annotations,and a relatively small number of illustration annotations,but all kinds of annotations have distinctive characteristics.Secondly,based on the description of the four types of paratexts,the author discusses the manifestation of Roy’s subjectivity as a scholar-translator in his paratexts.In the translation of the novel title,Roy takes a double title to retain the multiple implied meanings of the source text,uses a noun to name the volume title to make it concise and coherent,and translates the chapter title into a symmetrical two-couplet style to preserve the semantic and formalistic features of the original;In the cast of characters,Roy lists all the characters in the novel and gives a detailed introduction,which makes the cast not only comprehensive but also convenient for readers to read;In the introduction,Roy’s academic interpretation of Jin Ping Mei,mainly includes presenting his academic views,making explanations on Xunzi’s philosophy and Jin Ping Mei,and making illustrations with quotations from other works.As for the annotations,Roy’s subjectivity as a scholar-translator is reflected in tracing the source of the quotations,tracing the source of characters,illustrating the academic views,illustrating the amendments and illustrating the original author’s intention,etc.Finally,given the distinctive features of the paratexts,the author first analyzes the readers’ comments on the paratexts of Roy’s translation,from the perspectives of professional readers and common readers.It shows that most readers hold a positive attitude towards the paratexts.However,some readers express some drawbacks of it,such as too many annotations,or too much of the translator’s subjective doctrines.In addition,to further explore the acceptance status of Roy’s translation,the author collects data from two aspects: the library collection quantity of the book around the world,and the sales of the book.The author compares it with Clement Egerton’s The Golden Lotus,finding that Roy’s translation is much more popular.Finally,the author puts forward several suggestions for the future English translation of Chinese literature,so as to further promote the cross-culture communication of Chinese literature. |
