Intertextuality And The English Translations Of Fu Sheng Liu Ji

Intertextuality is a textual theory, first put forward by the French textual theorist Julia Kristeva in the early 1960s and later developed by Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Gerard Genette, et al. In the early 1990s intertextuality was introduced into translation studies, bringing a new perspective to the field. Translation itself is the transformation of intertextuality, because the source text is the intertext (pretext) of the target text. Fu Sheng Liu Ji, a famous autobiographic novel with strong intertexual signs, has two influential English versions by Lin Yutang and by Pratte and Chiang Ssu-hui. This thesisdraws on these two versions to examine how intertexual signs are translated by adopting different translating strategies.Intertextuality foregrounds the indetermination of the text; hence different readers may have different interpretation about the meaning. Since translators are also readers, different translators may adopt different translation strategies according to his or her previous experience and understanding. On the one hand, translators need to rely on other related or relevant texts in order to guarantee the readability and acceptability. On the other hand, translators need to take full consideration of the appropriateness to the target text readers. When reading the text, readers often take with them their previous experience. Generally speaking, translators lead readers to refresh their experience and to understand intertexual associations of the source text in order to satisfy their expectation of alien sentiment and find similar intertextual associations from the target culture in order to make translations easier to read and accept. This means translators need to choose between two translation strategies, foreignization and domestication. Since different translators have different "previous experience", even the same intertextual sign may be translated through different strategies. In this dissertation, the two English translations of Fu Sheng Liu Ji are compared and analyzed from the perspective of intertextuality, to see what strategies are adopted by the translators and why they are chosen in translation. The conclusions come as the following: the translators should first recognize the intertextual signs in the source text; the translators have flexibly combined the domestication and foreignization together in translating the intertextual signs; the intertextual signs in Fu Sheng Liu Ji have been transferred successfully to the target text readers.