A Medio-translatology Study Of The English Translations Of Wang Anyi’s Love Trilogy

As a prominent Chinese woman writer,Wang Anyi enjoys high reputation in the West and many of her works that are translated into English have evoked widespread repercussion abroad,especially the Love Trilogy,namely Love on a Barren Mountain,Love in a Small Town and Brocade Valley.However previous studies of Wang Anyi and her translated works are conducted in general terms.Except for the fragments that are scattered in different papers and the studies of a single love story,Wang Anyi’s Love Trilogy has not yet been studied in a comprehensive and systematic manner.This paper adopts a medio-translatology perspective on the study of Wang Anyi’s Love Trilogy from five aspects,analysis of the publisher,the content,the translators,the media,the reader and effects.It is found that the translation of Love Trilogy has its unique social,historical and cultural context.By an analysis of the publishers,it reveals that the academic root of Renditions in Hong Kong and New Directions in New York is the main reason why Love Trilogy are published outside mainland China.In terms of text analysis,it explores the extratextual and intratextual factors that contribute to the popularity of Love Trilogy in the West,such as the author,time and space,subject matter,content,lexis,sentence structure,and suprasegmental features.As for the translator analysis,it indicates that Eva Huang and Bonnie S.McDougall’s female identity as translator and their common concern for readers and Chinese culture work together to represent the love stories successfully.In regard to the media,it points out that academic researches of Chinese literature in the west and Wang Anyi’s personal promotion in the international literary and publishing circles are the main channels of transmission.And finally,it defines the types of readers and analyzes the reader’s response by randomly chosen excerpts of readers’ reviews and the effects analysis is based on the library holding data on WorldCat,and it further explores the factors that influence the effects from aspects of choice of subject matter,intratextual rhetoric and translators’ promotion.This study provides an overall picture of the translation,publication,transmission,and reception of Wang Anyi’s Love Trilogy systematically.It may help to enrich the study of Wang Anyi and her translated works and provide foundation for the further study of translation model of Wang Anyi’s works.