scholarly journals Repressed Sexual Modernity: A Case Study of Herbert Giles’ (1845 - 1935) Rendition of Pu Songling’s Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio (1880) in the late Qing

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 9-18
Author(s):  
Wing Bo Anna TSO

Translation studies in English and Chinese has long been of great interest to academics. Yet, Chinese scholars who have translation training and linguistic expertise are often found to “give excessive attention to listing facts and probing linguistic matters, to the neglect of the cultural and contextual considerations that have given rise to translation in China in the first place” (Lin, 2002, p. 170). Much emphasis has been placed on translation strategies, while translation “in connection with power and patronage” (Lefereve, 1992, p. 10) is overlooked, leaving “existing ideology” or “existing poetics” (Lefereve, 1992, p. 10), such as gender unexplored. In light of this, this paper attempts to take the literary and cultural approach and focus on examining the gender ideologies in Pu Songling’s Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio (1740) and Herbert Giles’ English rendition (1880). By comparing the source and target texts, the paper reveals that in many of Pu Songling’s stories, spirit-freelove and sexual pleasure are celebrated. A witty parody of the imitative structures of gender can be found in Pu Songling’s “Painted Skin” too. Unfortunately, to a large extent, such transgressive gender views are repressed in Giles’ English rendition.

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (6) ◽  
pp. 718
Author(s):  
Qing Qiu

With the increasing relevance of feminism and translation studies, how to embody female discourse in translation has become an important issue in feminist translation and in reflecting the translator’s subjectivity. Based on the feminist translation theory, this study will explore how female translators use translation strategies and methods to highlight female discourse through a comparative analysis of the two Chinese versions of To the Lighthouse, aiming to reveal the differences between female’s translation and male’s as a result of their gender consciousness, thus bringing beneficial inspiration to translation studies and translation work.


Babel ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 61 (3) ◽  
pp. 394-410 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wu Guangjun ◽  
Zhang Huanyao

Ideology is a major issue in Translation Studies. With a case study of the Chinese translations of English news headlines concerning the South China Sea disputes on the website of www.ftchinese.com, this paper attempts to provide insights into the translation of ideologies in news in the Chinese context. In the theoretical framework of critical discourse analysis, the ideological factors underlying the disparity between the English news headlines and their Chinese translations are explored. The three-dimensional model of analysis put forward by Fairclough is modified and adopted in this paper as the basic steps of analysis: firstly, describe the differences between the original and their translations; secondly, associate them with the social reality; finally, account for those differences. In addition, to demonstrate how translators maneuvered to reach a compromise with the antagonistic ideologies which may set difficulties either for the news to win the acceptance of Chinese online readers or pass the Chinese government censorship, this paper offers an analysis of the translation strategies adopted in those Chinese translations, such as substitution, omission as well as the more subtle strategies, including changes of modality and actor. It is found that in the Chinese translations of the English news headlines, translators’ priority is on producing translations suitable to target readers and censors' ideology, rather than linguistic equivalents. Therefore, translating ideology-loaded texts adds a new way to understand translation and ideological explorations in Translation Studies have great potentials.


2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (9) ◽  
pp. 209-213
Author(s):  
Jingliang Yu

Intercultural communication has always been an important concept and core hot-spot in the field of intercultural research. In the early 1980s, Chinese scholars introduced the study of intercultural communication. The study of intercultural communication in China has formed a trend of cross-integration with the disciplines including Language Teaching, Translation Studies and Culturology, etc., after about 40 years of development. Thanks to the differences between Chinese and English, there are still many issues in translation on intercultural communication. Therefore, this research focuses on the in-depth analysis of three types of differences in the English translated text of Song of a Pipa Player from the perspective of intercultural communication to put forward corresponding translation strategies for intercultural communication and offer some help to the translation among different cultures.


2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 148-163
Author(s):  
Oleksandr Rebrii ◽  
Ganna Tashchenko

The article proposes a psycholinguistic approach to investigating translation strategies on the basis of information obtained in the course of the retrospective experiment designed by the authors and defined as ‘Partial Delayed Report of Problems and their Solution’. The aim of the research is to expose and describe translation strategies for resolving such a variety of translation difficulties as phonographic deviations. The object of the research is translation strategies as a mental by nature and complex by structure plan for the translator’s actions. The subject of the research is specifics of the above strategies’ formation and implementation in literary translation. The main method of the research is retrospective experimental technique ‘Partial Delayed Report of Problems and their Solution’; other methods employed include algorithmic modeling (for prospected translation strategies and substrategies) and comparative analysis (for control units in the source and target texts). The material of the research was twofold: (1) the fragment of Charles Dickens’s novel “The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club” and its translations carried out by 21 semi-professional subjects of the experiment; (2) the subjects’ reports in the form of the answers to the questionnaire completed and submitted after the translation. Since strategies in translation studies are mostly dealt with within cultural approach, the authors turned to the concept of communication strategies as a foundation of their own psycholinguistic model of translation strategies for phonographic deviations. The analysis of the experimental data supports the conclusion that the translator initially forms a strategy (conscious mental plan) of overcoming a certain variety of translation difficulties (such as phonographic deviations) and then implements it as a sequence of moves (substrategies) aimed at providing for the most natural for the target reader translation variant.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (6) ◽  
pp. 666
Author(s):  
Wenjia Zhou ◽  
Yuying Li

With the cultural turn in translation studies in 1970s, the focus of translation studies was gradually changed from traditional linguistics to culture. André Lefevere put forward to Manipulation Theory that has further broadened the field of translation studies. It holds that translation is not to realize the meaning equivalence between source text and target text, but to realize the compromise between the source cultural system and the target cultural system, in which the translation will be manipulated by some factors. Because Children’s Literature is classified specially, it may be influenced by different cultural system. Therefore, this paper chooses Chinese translation of Charlotte’s Web as a case study from the perspective of Manipulation Theory, which draws a conclusion that ideology, poetics and patronage have impacts on translation strategies of children’s literature, in order to facilitate new theoretical researches and improve Chinese translations of Children’s Literature.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 307-327
Author(s):  
Richard Pleijel

Abstract This paper aims to bring research on different forms of group-level cognition into conversation with Cognitive Translation Studies (CTS), the focal point of the paper being cognitive processes in translation teams. It is argued that an analysis of cognition in translation teams, which exhibit the properties of a cognitive system, needs to be placed on group-level. A case study of a team, translating the Hebrew Bible Book of Psalms into Swedish in the 1980’s, is presented. The empirical base for the case study consists of archival material in the form of draft translations and paratexts. The methodological question is thus raised whether, and if so in what way, cognitive processes may be analyzed retrospectively, and not only from a real time perspective. By treating the archival material as cognitive artifacts which have constituted an integral part of the team’s cognitive process, the question is tentatively answered in a favourable way. This, it is finally argued, opens up interesting possibilities for joining CTS with translator archives research, Genetic Translation Studies (GTS), and cognitive archeology.


2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 50
Author(s):  
Gholam-Reza Parvizi

The question of image in literary studies and in recent years in Translation Studies is one of the most problematic innature. In the present study an attempt was made to define the nature of translating linguistic constructions – evokingimages in the mind of reader – in English novels and their rendered versions in Persian translations. In this studyseven types of images (visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, tactile, kinesthetic and organic) in two English novelsand their rendered versions in Persian were analyzed based on two theoretical frameworks, the first one is Jiang’sImage-Based Model to Literary Translation (2008) by which the nature of translation of images were examined andthe other is Chesterman’s translation strategies (1997) which help to systematize translation strategies adopted bytranslators in rewriting the images in English novels. The results have shown that in most of the cases the images thatare intended by original author have been changed in the translations, and the aesthetic experience of the ST reader isdifferent from that of the TT reader.


2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 54-72
Author(s):  
Pei-chen Li (李佩蓁)

Focusing on the business operation of the Chen Fuqian family in south Taiwan, this paper analyses the importance of traditional business customs and family organization in international trade. Alongside the expansion of trade in Taiwan in the late Qing period, Taiwanese merchants would try to learn Western system of management to better position themselves in the intensive business competition. The development of the Chen family business thus epitomized the interaction between traditional Chinese and Western managerial system. (This article is in Chinese.)


2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 5-6
Author(s):  
Nina GOLOB

Yet another year has come to its end. It brought us some new ideas and we have spent several months in preparations to realize them.The greatest change is that we may be expecting the new ALA issue within a month, in January 2018 already. From the year to come, we will still be publishing two issues per year, with the winter issue published in January coming first. The second issue will be the summer issue, published in July. At this opportunity we would like to express our gratitude to all the authors in the ALA journal, and alongside send out our call for new articles. All the rest of the changes might only be noticed by our regular readers, while newcomers will hopefully find our e-journal competent, functional, and user friendly. This number of the ALA journal is mostly dedicated to the area of translation studies, however, also contains three interesting works on language. Wing Bo Anna TSO in her work “Repressed Sexual Modernity: A Case Study of Herbert Giles’ (1845 - 1935) Rendition of Pu Songling’s Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio (1880) in the Late Qing” attempts the literary-cultural approach and investigates the lost in translation. She focused on examining gender ideologies in the original and translated work to find out that transgressive gender views get strongly repressed in Giles’ English rendition.A similar thought, namely the importance of the cultural background of the text in translation is stressed in the article “Metaphor in Translation: Cognitive Perspectives on Omar Khayyam’s Poetry as Rendered into English and Kurdish”, written by Rahman VEISI HASAR and Ehsan PANAHBAR. As metaphors as cognitive phenomena can not be relegated to linguistic expression only, the research findings reveal that translators have mostly been successful in translating metaphors dependent on shared cultural models, however, have failed to recreate metaphors dependent on non-shared cultural models.Difficulties in translating metaphors were also experienced by Eva VUČKOVIČ and Byoung Yoong KANG, who in their article “Prevajanje Ko Unove poezije iz korejščine v slovenščino” address several major problems they have encountered when translating poetry from Korean into Slovene. The aricle is written in Slovene and is a pionieering work on translation studies from Korean into Slovene.Lija GANTAR wrote an article “Ancient Greek Legend in Modern Japanese Literature: ‘Run, Melos!’ by Dazai Osamu” in which she discusses how the Japanese author managed to retell a Western literature story in a way to succesfully make it a part of the Japanese literature. The following three articles refer to language. Sweta SINHA in her article “Fuzzy Logic Based Teaching/Learning of a Foreign Language in Multilingual Situations” managed to incorporate the concept of Fuzzy Logic (FL), which primarily gained momentum in the areas of artificial intelligence and allied researches, into a foreign language classroom. She describes language pedagogy as more real-like when observed through the lens of fuzzy logic and fuzzy thinking, and claims that in that way language interference is more of a resource than a challenge.Now already a sequential work on adjective distribution was contributed by LI Wenchao, who wrote the article “Revisit Adjective Distribution in Chinese”. In it the author re-classifies Chinese monosyllabic adjectives and verbs in light of ‘scale structure’ and examines how various adjectives are associated with different scalar layers of verbs.  Finally, an interesting project report on the development of  early Persian vocabulary in the process of first language acquisition was written by Hajar SHAHHOSEINI. The report is entitled “Investigation of Early Vocabulary Development of a Persian Speaking Child at Age 2 Years Old in Iran”.Editors and Editorial Board thank all the contributors to this volume, and wish the regular and new readers of the ALA journal a pleasant read full of inspiration.


2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 83
Author(s):  
Fang Li ◽  
Yingqin Liu

This study explores the effects of teaching EFL students to use an outline in their English essays. The researchers maintain that using outlines can raise students’ awareness of different audience expectations embedded in the rhetoric of the target language (English) and culture and can improve their English academic writing. The study was based on a four-week long case study at a university in Xi’an, China, in which 24 Chinese EFL students at the College of Translation Studies participated. A discourse analysis was conducted by comparing the Chinese EFL students’ English essays produced at the beginning of the study with those produced at the end of the study after learning and practicing outlining for writing the English essays. Email inquiries were used for understanding the participants’ viewpoints on learning how to write English essay outlines. The findings reveal that teaching EFL students to use outlining in their English essays is an effective way to help them improve their essay writing. Not only can it enhance the students’ understanding about using the English thesis statements, but it can also help improve the use of related, logical, and specific detailed examples to support the main ideas in their essays. The email inquiries also revealed that the students believe that outline learning helped them to understand the differences between Chinese and English essay writing. The implications of the study for intercultural rhetoric are also discussed.


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