The Variation of Image in Huang Jizhong’s Chinese translation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Abstract

In the 1980s, the cultural turn appeared in translation studies, which brought translation studies a great opportunity to draw nutrients from different disciplines. Narratology and Imagology take part in translation studies, which offers hope for the cultural turn in translation studies. Metalepsis is a term in Narratology that Genett defines that any intrusion by the extradiegetic narrator or narratee into the diegetic universe(or by diegetic characters into a metadiegetic universe, etc.), or the inverse (as in Cortazar), produces an effect of strangeness that is either comical (when, as in Sterne or Diderot, it is presented in a joking tone) or fantastic. This paper contrasts Uncle Tom’s Cabin with its translation Tang Mu Da Bo De Xiao Wu by Huang Jizhong in order to explore the variation of the image of African American based on lexicon and Metalepsis, in the hope of finding out the reason for variation of the image. The variation exists in translations so that the target readers could misunderstand the image in the source text. As for translators, attaching much importance to translating the source language's image should be caught first. The cliché and narrative strategies in the source text could be highly recognized.