The Manipulation of Images of Women in Translation in Early Twentieth Century Hong Kong Chinese Newspapers

Abstract

The early twentieth century witnessed both the thriving of Chinese newspapers in the British colony Hong Kong and the boom of Chinese translation of foreign literature. This article, through the translated literature in Chinese newspapers, explores the interaction among print media, Chinese women, and translation in the early twentieth century Hong Kong. It argues that many factors contributed to the prevailing ideology concerning women in the British colony, including the skewed sex ratio, Confucianism as the hegemonic ideology, and the conspiracy between elite Chinese and the colonial rulers, and thus that the manipulation of images of women in Chinese translations was ideologically motivated. Such pervasive ideology characteristic of Hong Kong at that given moment in history undoubtedly created pressures on the translators, which were exacerbated by the difference in the construction of the images of women in the English original and its Chinese translated counterparts.