Abstract
Soon after the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, foreign translation of Chinese culture was put on the agenda. Lu Xun’s short stories were selected as representative works and translated into English by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang (hereinafter referred to as “the Yangs”) in the 1950s and 1960s under the special international and domestic environment, and they have played an important role in spreading Chinese culture to the world. Based on André Lefevere’s Manipulation Theory, especially its three elements, namely, poetics, ideology and patronage, this paper examines the translation methods adopted by the Yangs in their translation of Lu Xun’s short story “Master Gao”. Through example analysis, the article concludes that the Yangs mainly adopted literal translation under the influence of poetics, ideology and patronage in the then special social background. It is hoped that the research aims to provide a theoretical and practical reference for future translation and dissemination of Chinese literary works to the world.
Highlights
Soon after the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, foreign translation of Chinese culture was put on the agenda
According to the complete statistics, 101 sentences adopt literal translation in the Yangs’ version, accounting for 53.44%, and free translation is used in 88 sentences, accounting for 46.56%, so literal translation is more frequently used than free translation
Based on the above two modes, sentences with literal translation in the Yangs’ version of “Master Gao” are classified, and the effect of the translation methods is analyzed in the framework of Manipulation Theory
Summary
“Master Gao”, a short story in Lu Xun’s collection Wandering (or Panghuang), aptly depicts Master Gao as a pompous feudalist hypocrite. The highly satirical story criticizes the maladies of the time and reveals the reactionary ambitions of the survivals of feudalism during the New Culture Movement. A literature search on the CNKI (Note 1) database reveals that there are eight academic papers on the English translations of Lu Xun’s Wandering but only one focuses on “Master Gao” (as of February 1, 2021, the same below). Compared with studies on Lu Xun’s other fiction collections like Outcry, there is fewer researches on the English translations of Wandering and much fewer on “Master Gao”. The popularity of the English translations of Chinese classics lasts over time because of their undeniable aspects that are worthy of people’s comments and study. In view of this, applying André Lefevere’s Manipulation Theory, this paper focuses on the Yangs’ translation of “Master Gao” to analyze the underlying reasons for their choice of translation methods in terms of poetics, ideology and patronage
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