Translation Study Of Literary Works From The Gender Perspective

The "cultural turn" in the field of translation makes the scope of translation studies continue to expand outward,and socio-cultural factors are incorporated into translation studies.At the same time,with the development of the feminist movement and the influence of feminist thoughts,translation studies from the gender perspective emerged and flourished.This article combines the related achievements of sociolinguistics and translation theory to compare and analyze the four Chinese versions of Chekhov’s short stories "Jumping Woman","Anna on the Neck",and "The Bride"(including the Chinese versions of two male translators Ru Long and Li Huifan,and the Chinese versions of two female translators Zeng Ting and Jiang Lijuan).On the one hand,the gender differences in language use between male traslators and female translators are mainly reflected in three levels of lexis,syntax and discourse style.Male translators prefer to use simple and plain words,and seldom use Chinese idioms,four-character phrases and reduplicated words,use interjections and modal particles less frequently;male translators prefer to use short sentences,and usually translate the sentences in accordance with the original sentences with less sentence pattern transformations;the overall discourse style of male translators’ versions is direct,concise,and tough with less emotional changes.Female translators prefer to use Chinese idioms,four-character phrases and reduplicated words,and use interjections and modal particles more frequently,and they usually pay much attention to the semantic distinction and aesthetic connotation of the words used in translation and to the emotional communication with characters in the litarary works;furthermore,female translators prefer to convert the sentence pattern into an expressive Chinese sentence,and use parallel sentences and antithesis sentences more frequently;the overall discourse style of female translators’ versions is natural,beautiful,euphemistic and full of emotion and expressiveness.On the other hand,both male and female translators are consciously or unconsciously affected by their gender awareness and construct gender identities in their translations.The translation versions of two male translators,as a whole,are close to the original text of Chekhov,and there is only a small number of examples in which we can find an obvious male perspective;two female translators show a contradictory gender awareness in their translation versions with both obedience and resistance to the traditional gender consciousness in our society.In addition,the gender differences in language use in the translation versions themselves are also a reflection of the gender performativity of translators.