On The Gender Performance Of Hei Ma's Translated Version Of Lady Chatterley's Lover

Lady Chatterley's Lover is of great significance as the last long story by D.H.Lawrence,a British literary master.The story concerns Lady Chatterley,a young aristocratic woman,who has an affair with Oliver Mellors,a gamekeeper of her paralyzed upper class husband.Through a delicate description of the female experience and feeling in sex,D.H.Lawrence shows sincere humanistic care and sympathy to women in the novel and also explores the cure for the dilemma among modern civilization,nature and human nature through gender relations.Readers worldwide are fascinated with the rather bold theme as well as the serious and provoking philosophical thought.Alone in China,the novel boasts more than ten versions of Chinese translation.Among them,the version translated by Hei Ma(Bi Bingbin)is often praised with its delicate wording and receives a rather wider range of readers.This thesis aims to study the representation of gender traits and relations in Hei Ma's translated version of Lady Chatterley's Lover from the gender perspective.Inspired by the gender performativity theory put forward by Judith Butler,the thesis will see translation of gender traits as a gender performance,and studies the following questions:(1)What kind of gender traits are represented in the translated text?What difference does it make?(2)What strategies and method are applied in the translation to help represent the gender traits?(3)What gender discourse is implied behind the gender performance?Through a comparison between the original text and the target text and discourse analysis,the thesis finds that the gender traits in the translation,as constructed in performance,are slightly changed and distorted.Firstly,the translator,taking translation as the site of gender performance,tones down the pressing tone and overstates the weakness of female through omission,sentence transition and overstatement,thus performs a false femininity.While for masculinity performance,the translator adopts strategies including addition,perspective transition and understatement,so that male images and narrative are added,and derogatory words are euphemized to strengthen male authority.Thirdly,the sexual relationship is also tinged with female subordination and moral judgement.Through the above findings,the thesis tries to prove that what is implied behind this kind of performance is the social and cultural expectations of gender.And translation is a kind of performance that happened in the interaction with social culture,and wish to provide some inspiration for gender and translation studies.