A Critical Study On Eileen Chang’s Translation The Old Man And The Sea From The Perspective Of Feminist Translation Theory

The appearance of feminist translation theory is the consequence that translators in Canada,especially female translators,gradually have feminist consciousness and recognize that women have long been discriminated in patriarchal society as translation in the translation field.Therefore,they constantly adopt feminist translation strategies such as complementing,prefacing or footnoting and hijacking or appropriating in the process of translation to attach great importance to the identity and subjectivity of feminist translators through this kind of language selection,meeting their needs to establish female discourse or female authority by eliminating male privileges,male discourse or male terminology.Ernest Miller Hemingway has received numerous awards since he completed the masterpiece The Old Man and the Sea in 1952.The novel has been translated by many translators due to its reputation,such as Eileen Chang,Yu Guangzhong,Wu Lao and Huang Yuanshen and so on.The first translator who translates The Old Man and the Sea into Chinese is Eileen Chang,nevertheless,what a surprised thing is that Eileen Chang’s Chinese translation The Old Man and the Sea is not as famous as the translations by Wu Lao,Huang Yuanshen and so on,and even little recognized by others.The factors behind it are worth investigating.Eileen Chang is a female writer and translator,but she still chooses to translate this highly masculine novel written by the male writer Hemingway in the same year after the publication of The Old Man and the Sea.Does her identity as a female writer have an impact on her Chinese translation The Old Man and the Sea,whether she can maintain the original style of The Old Man and the Sea or not?Therefore,under the guidance of feminist translation theory,this thesis will conduct a critical study on the word selection and sentence structure and so on of Eileen Chang’s Chinese translation The Old Man and the Sea by using cases method,comparison method and so on,so as to make an attempt to solve the issue.Through analyzing the Chinese translation The Old Man and the Sea,the conclusion can be drawn that Eileen Chang,as a female writer,whose female consciousness in her novels also influences her Chinese translation The Old Man and the Sea.In other words,she applies strategies of supplementing,prefacing and hijacking or appropriating and so on to establish female authority or female discoursesin the translation by eliminating the unique male terms,male discourses or male privileges in the original work,demonstrating her identity and subjectivity as a female translator,her ideas of equality between men and women and the status of women and translations by adding or rewriting the masculine words or sentences.These translation strategies in her Chinese translation The Old Man and the Sea in line with feminist translation theories in her translation process,however,these translation strategies destroy Hemingway’s concise writing style and weaken the male masculinity in The Old Man and the Sea to some extent.Perhaps this is one of the reasons why Eileen Chang’s Chinese translation is not as popular as others.