A Study Of Julia Lovell’s Thought On Translation

With a long history and five-thousand years of civilization, China has been recognized as the political and economic power rather than cultural power. In the English-reading community, Chinese literature has few readers and popularity. However, Mo Yan’s winning of the Nobel Prize in Literature has changed the situation. The achievement Mo Yan has gained is credited with his talents and continuous efforts of translators and scholars. Some brilliant translators like Howard Goldblatt and Julia Lovell have made great contributions to the outward spread of Chinese literature in the world.Julia Lovell is a distinguished literary translator focusing on translating modern and contemporary Chinese literature in UK. She has translated many Chinese works among which Lust, Caution and The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China:The Complete Fiction of Lu Xun were included in the canonical Penguin Classics. They have promoted the spread of Lu Xun and Chinese literature in English-speaking countries. As a young and productive translator, Julia Lovell is successful in introducing Chinese literature. However, few scholars studied her translation thought systematically.By studying Julia Lovell’s life experience, literary works, translation works, and interviews, especially a case study of The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China:The Complete Fiction of Lu Xun, this thesis intends to find out the elements that affect her translation, and gives a full view of her translation thought. After a detailed analysis of her translation, this thesis has found out that Julia Lovell’s translation purpose is to introduce the richness and the value of the Chinese literature to English readers. She thinks that translation is the faithful recreation. Translator should be faithful to the original text, but absolute fidelity is impossible, therefore, recreation like domestication and rewording is necessary. She emphasizes the fluency of the text and the original reading experience and keeps use of footnotes and endnotes to a minimum. The reader awareness and their acceptability play a significant role in her translation thought. It’s helpful to improve the translation of contemporary Chinese literature and promote the spread of Chinese culture in the west by studying the foreign translators like Julia Lovell and their translation thoughts. This thesis contains five chapters. Chapter one is an introduction, which deals with the research background, objective, methodology and thesis structure. Chapter two is the literature review, including previous studies on Julia Lovell and on the translations of Lu Xun’s stories. Chapter three gives an account of Julia Lovell’s life experience, non-fiction writings, and translation works. The fourth chapter focuses on a comprehensive and deep-going discussion of Julia Lovell’s translation thought based on her English translation of The Complete Fiction of Lu Xun. In this part, five aspects have been discussed:the selection of source texts, the general translation strategy, faithful recreation, the domestication strategy in translating culture-loaded words and target-reader-oriented translation strategies. The last chapter includes the summary, major findings, limitations of this thesis, and suggestions for further study.