A Study Of Two Chinese Versions Of Breakfast At Tiffany’s----from The Perspective Of Translator’s Subjectivity

The translator is the subject of translation, who contributes to cultural construction. In the course of translation, the translator’s understanding and description of the original text will turn out to be different resulting from the influence of his cultural background, personal experience and his own values. With the occurrence of "cultural turn", translation studies have gradually moved from focusing on faithfulness to the original texts to paying more attention to translation subject. This shift has changed the traditional situation of translators where they were regarded invisible.Different cultural backgrounds, experiences, social positions, and other ideologies of the translators will lead to various interpretations, different structures and expressions to produce different effects in the translation. Based on the translator’s subjectivity, this paper carries out studies on two Chinese versions of Breakfast at Tiffany’s by analyzing the two versions to present the differences caused by translator’s subjectivity and to make further exploration of the causes of the differences.Breakfast at Tiffany’s is one of American literary classics. It was commonly regarded as the best fiction novel of Capote. Ever since two Chinese versions were published in1988, many a scholar in China has devoted time and energy to the study on Capote. It is regrettable that few studies showed interest in Chinese versions of his novels. Two Chinese versions of Breakfast at Tiffany’s have been chosen for the study. One was rendered by Tang Yongkuan and the other, Dong Leshan.This paper has found that there are many differences in the two versions even though the two translators translated this work almost at the same time. Taking their choices of words as an example, high frequency of classic expressions became one of the distinctive characteristics in Tang’s version while Dong prefers colloquial expressions. Tang Yongkuan used many four-character Chinese idioms in his version so that it reads naturally and idiomatic in Chinese. On the contrary, Dong Leshan aims to express the idea in the way that is easy for Chinese readers to understand. Correspondingly, he tended to split long sentences into short ones.The differences become even more obvious when it comes to description of literary images. In the two versions, Holly, the heroine in the novel turns out to be very different resulting from the subjectivity of the two translators. In Tang’s version, she is rude, uneducated and dissolute. However, in Dong’s version, she is helpless, pure and warm-hearted. The different attitudes can be traced in their prefaces. In Tang’s preface, he described Holly as a wild girl who lingers in cafes, bars and other social networking places with all kinds of men in order to earn her living and survive in the complicated society. Holly in Tang’s mind is a capacity-limited girl who has to compromise to her fate in order to make her dreams come true. He didn’t appreciate the behaviors of Holly, therefore, he used degraded words to describe her appearance, language and behaviors. Nevertheless, Dong Leshan has a quite different idea about Holly. In Dong’s eyes, Holly is good in nature though she seems vainglorious and profligate. Even though her personal life is in a mess, she is still an unsophisticated girl in essence. In his preface, he argued that Holly is an unfortunate girl from low class with good virtue. What’s more, Dong quoted Holly’s words to identify that she has an inner noble quality. These words of Dong Leshan convey the information that he speaks positively of the heroine. To him, Holly deserves praise and sympathy, which makes him highlight Holly’s merits and conceal her defects in his translation. Apart from Holly, Berman and Rusty Twaler, other two characters in this novel, are also presented with different descriptions in the two versions.Translators’subjectivity also lies in their attitudes to sensitive social topics in their translations. Tang Yongkuan chose to render them indirectly or erase the information while Dong made them explicit rather than implicit.The last aspect is figurative language. When translating similes, metaphors or personifications, Tang retained the literal meaning and sometimes added its figurative meaning while Dong ignored the literal meaning and just represented the figurative meaning.Through a comparative study on the two Chinese versions, this paper aims to present the manipulation of translator’s subjectivity in translation. At the same time, the author wrote the paper with the purpose to attract attention to the two Chinese versions of Breakfast at Tiffany’s.