A Study Of Gender-related Modulation In Translation Strategies In Four English Versions Of Zhufu

Feminist translation theory emphasizes the translator's intervention and rewriting of the text.Feminist translation theory has been on the verge of academic research and translation studies for a long time.Firstly,its original intention is to eliminate the biased language against women in a patriarchal society,which is supposed to promote the realization of equality between men and women.Secondly,it tries to eliminate the discrimination against the translation so that the translation and the source text enjoy equal status,rather than subordination: this has the same trend with the contemporary study on translation,which is taken as an independent discipline.The language of translation is also taken as an independent language.Feminist translation theory has gradually developed into gender related translation theory.The research on gender consciousness,feminist consciousness and feminist identity of translator has gradually become an important part of gender related research.This paper chooses the short story Zhufu and its four English translation versions,which describes the tragic life of a woman in the feudal society of China,as an example of the analysis of gender-related translation strategies.The translation is translated by two male translators William A.Lyell,Wang Chi-chen and two female translators Julia Lovell and Liu Wugou.In the framework of feminist translation strategies,the author makes a discourse analysis of the four translated versions from the perspective of gender,and discusses whether the four translated versions are guided by the female translation strategy of "hijacking" in the translation process,using the translation techniques classified by Vinay and Darbelnet,such as metonymy,explicative,reversal of terms etc.,to reflect the translator's gender consciousness or feminist consciousness.This paper extracts 106 gender related descriptions from the Chinese gender vocabulary summarized by Wu(2011:1).Thispaper makes a statistical analysis of the usage of gender words,the average sentence length etc.in the original and four translation texts.Among them,Lyell has the longest average sentence length and the number of English gender words is the least in his translation.The number of gender words in Liu Wugou's translation is the largest.The number of sentences with men as the subject of translation is the largest in Wang Chi-chen's translation.The number of Lyell,Liu Wugou and Julia Lovell use women as the subject of the translation sentences is similar.Combined with relevant theories,this paper finds that feminist translation theory is a purpose driven translation theory.Take Lyell's translation as an example: Lyell's translation aims to convey the original author's accusation of unfair treatment of women in the old society to the maximum extent,and at the same time to meet the target readers' acceptance of the description of gender differences in the translation.Lyell intervenes and rewrites in the process of translation.In terms of the linguistic features of Lyell's translation,the average sentence length is the longest.He further explains the description of gender related expressions,and replaces the description of gender differences in the text with formal subject or subordinate sentences.