Translating The Female Narrative

As a pioneer female writer in China,Can Xue has been translated and has been widely praised overseas.Most of the current studies on Can Xue start with its absurd imagery and narrative features,analyzing the spiritual world constructed subconsciously in her works.However,Can Xue’s works are also full of distinctive feminist features.Her female identity is a natural advantage that guarantees the existence of her subconsciousness-driven writing in Chinese culture.Unlike other female writers of her time,her writing about women is usually presented in a more subtle way.This symbolic writing of gender also enables the spiritual essence of women,or the true female consciousness,to be revealed.Love in the New Millennium seems to tell a passionate love story between a group of contemporary men and women.Different from ordinary love stories,the love between men and women in this book is more like a competitive relationship.In the process of catching up,women’s selves gradually become full.In fact,as long as you dig deep along the author’s well-designed clues,you can find the hidden theme of disillusionment in this book.The courageous breakthroughs of bottom-level women in family,work and society,their yearning and pursuit of freedom all seem to be helpless struggles in the end.This paper is going to discuss how this kind of female consciousness is presented in translation.Namely,how the translator intervenes in the reconstruction of the female consciousness.Based on the theoretical framework of feminist narratology and image metaphor,this paper analyzes the translation of female narrative voice and female image metaphor in the original text,and explores whether the translator successfully reconstructs the female narrative features.The analysis shows that the translator has consciously strengthened the three types of female narrative voices,retained the aesthetic effect of female image metaphors such as flower and bird,and successfully constructed the feminist narrative features.However,due to the concealed two-line narrative carefully laid out by the author,neither did the translator recognize it nor did she supplement the additional information of the image metaphors through translation,which to a certain extent caused the loss of the literary value of the original text.