A Comparative Analysis Between Self-Translation and Conventional Translation of Between Tears and Laughter From Gender Translation Perspective

Abstract

Based on the gender translation theory as well as both English and Chinese texts, this paper, with the help of corpus software, attempts to compare the self-translation and conventional translation of Between Tears and Laughter in terms of three gender translation strategies, including the supplementing, the prefacing and footnoting, and the highjacking as well. This paper holds that Lin Yutang and Song Biyun show their similarities and differences in the way they manipulate and “woman-handle” the text, and that translation, which is, in nature, a product of the “marriage” between the masculine authorship (or partnership) and feminine translator’s identity, is closely tied to translator’s literacy, biological gender, motivations, political stance as well as the specific historical and social environment. Despite the shared androgynous identity and “feminist aggressiveness”, Lin’s self-translation appears to be more concise, unrestrained as well as skopos-driven and emotional-enhanced both in diction and layout of the text by being modified into a political propaganda set to awaken his compatriots of innocence whereas the conventional translation, under the great influence of the particular politics and social reality of the days and by being de-politically simplified into a feminist work without particular political values, seems to be more foreignized in language and more faithful to the specific “writing project”, in which the translator’s initiative is, to some extent, fairly covert and restricted by the given historical environment.