Study On The English Version Of My Life As Emperor From The Perspective Of Imagology

As an important field of comparative literature, imagology mainly studies theimages of exotic nation or race in literary works. It focuses on how the images of the“other” is observed, imagined and recreated by the “self” and probes into thedeep-seated social and cultural background for the generation of these images whileidentifying image of the “self”reflected by the “other”.In translating activity, images in the original work are recreated in the targetlanguage culture by means of the translated text. In the process, translator replaces theoriginal author to be the observer and re-creator of the images which were created bythe author and then serves as the “other” being observed. In recreating images, thetranslator will be influenced by various factors, which may lead images of the “other”to vary from the original ones created by the author. As a cross-cultural communicationactivity, translation involves not only the transformation of language but also therecreation and transmission of images. An imagological perspective could provide uswith significant inspiration and invaluable reference in examining recreation of imagesof the “other” in the translated texts, assessing the transmission effect of images inliterary works and promoting the transmission of native images and cross-culturalcommunication as well.This paper discusses about the process in which the images in the original novel isobserved, imagined and recreated as well as the reasons for variations of images whenthey are reproduced by taking examples of images in My Life as Emperor, HowardGoldblatt’s English version of Su Tong’s novel Wo De Di Wang Sheng Ya for case study.In light of the research methods of imagolgoy, the paper conducted an analysis on thegeneration, transmission and variation of images in thetranslated text from the intrinsictextual aspect, including three levels of lexicons, hierarchical relation and plot as wellas the extrinsic textual aspect, involving the imaginaire social of the native nation towhich the translator as observer of images belongs and the study of translator as the re-creator of images. Based on the analysis, the paper points out that in the translatedtext of My Life as Emperor, images recreated by the translator tend to vary at the levelsof lexicons and hierarchical relation and that the variations are largely caused byimaginaire social of the translator’s native nation and his personal imagination,emotions and attitudes towards the exotic land.