Analyzing The Translation For The Publicity Of Chinese Children’s Literature From The Perspective Of Functional Recontextualization

General Secretary Xi Jinping stresses that we need to promote Chinese culture going global.To tell China’s story well and spread China’s voice effectively,it is of great significance to effectively publicize Chinese literature.Chinese children’s literature is an indispensable part of Chinese literature,and its publicity contributes significantly to the construction of national soft power.Therefore,we should pay more attention to the publicity translation of Chinese children’s literature.2016 marks a milestone in the publicity of Chinese children’s literature,since in this year Cao Wenxuan,a famous Chinese children’s literature writer,has won the International Andersen Prize as the first Chinese winner of this prize.Among all his C-E translation editions,those translated by Helen Wang,an English sinologist,have gained considerable reputation in the West.Thus,this thesis builds a parallel corpus of Helen Wang’s translations of Cao Wenxuan’s works containing 554 531 tokens to conduct a qualitative and quantitative study.The thesis intends to investigate the manifestations of functional recontextualization in the translation of Chinese children’s literature through corpus-based analysis,which may shed light on the publicity of Chinese children’s literature.Translation is in essence a process of deconstruction and reconstruction of context.During the process of translation,translators should consider both the transformation of text from the source language into the target language and the recontextualization of works from the source context to the target context.Systemic functional linguistics holds that context contains the context of culture and the context of situation,and the former is instantiated by the latter.Given this,the thesis constructs an analytical framework involving the recontextualization of culture and situation,which is guided by the relationship between the text and the context of situation proposed by Halliday and Hasan(1985)as well as Bernstein’s model of recontextualization of pedagogical discourse(Tsatsaroni,Ravanis & Falaga,2005).In this framework,the recontextualization of the context of situation is comprised of the recontextualization of field(represented by transitivity),tenor(including mood,modality,and person system),and mode(such as theme).Drawing on the division of culture proposed by Qi(1992),the recontextualization of culture contains the recontextualization of material culture(represented by culture-loaded expressions for daily necessities,foods and drinks,tools,as well as apparels and accessories,etc.),system and custom culture(represented by geographical names and characters’ names,etc.),and spiritual culture(such as four-character idioms and idiomatic expressions,etc.).With the help of UAM Corpus Tool 3.3x,Ant Conc3.5.8,and BFSU Para Conc 1.2.1.,this thesis sums up strategies and principles in the C-E translation of Chinese children’s literature via functional recontextualization,which can be applied to promote the publicity of Chinese children’s literature.It is found that six translation strategies can be applied in the translation of Chinese children’s literature from the perspective of functional recontextualization,namely transliteration,literal translation,addition,deletion,substitution,and rearrangement.Specifically,substitution strategy includes imagery replacement,concretization,and generalization.In addition,the distribution of cultural recontextualization strategies shows that literal translation and transliteration are preferred in the recontextualization of material culture as well as system and custom culture,respectively.In the recontextualization of spiritual culture,the most common strategy is substitution,in which generalization is preferred.Based upon what have been discussed above and the truth-seeking-utility-attaining continuum evaluation model(Zhou,2021),this thesis puts forward three translation principles which can be employed to aid in the publicity of Chinese children’s literature,namely,“utility-attaining oriented with a truth-seeking base”,“culture-oriented truth-seeking”,and“language-oriented utility-attaining”.To be specific,during the recontextualization of the context of situation,the principle of “utility-attaining oriented with a truth-seeking base”should be applied.In the context of culture,the principles of “culture-oriented truth-seeking”and “language-oriented utility-attaining” should be applied to the recontextualization of material culture as well as system and custom culture,and spiritual culture,respectively.The translator should take “truth-seeking” and “utility-attaining” into consideration.In other words,they should prioritize readers’ expectation and acceptance,with the aim of promoting the publicity of Chinese children’s literature.This thesis has some research value.Firstly,it attempts to apply functional recontextualization theory in the study of the publicity translation of Chinese children’s literature,which is a new perspective.In addition,it builds a parallel corpus of Helen Wang’s translations of Cao Wenxuan’s works to conduct a corpus-based quantitative and qualitative study.This corpus and the research statistics can provide some guidance for future studies.Last but not least,it sums up the translation strategies and principles that can be applied in the publicity of Chinese children’s literature via functional recontextualization,which offer some suggestions for translation practice.