A Study Of Anna Holmwood’s English Translation Of She Diao Ying Xiong Zhuan From The Perspective Of Translation Ethics

In 2018,Swedish translator Anna Holmwood’s Legends of the Condor Heroes I:A Hero Born,the first English volume of She Diao Ying Xiong Zhuan(《射雕英雄传》),was officially published worldwide and gained much positive feedback.However,it has also sparked a heated debate that invariably touches on the ethical dimensions of translation.This thesis attempts to take translation ethics as the perspective to explore Holmwood’s ethical decisions reflected in the translation through concluding translation strategies and methods,aiming to provide a reference for the English translation of Chinese wuxia novels and the overseas dissemination of wuxia culture.Based on previous studies,the thesis attempts to summarize three modes of translation ethics as the theoretical framework.They are ethics of fidelity which focuses on the relationship between source and target texts;ethics of communication which concerns target readers’ reception;and professional ethics of translators which centers on translators themselves.To some extent,these three modes are interrelated but relatively independent,hoping to give a comprehensive framework for examining Holmwood’s ethical choices.Qualitative and quantitative methods are used in the comparative analysis of the C-E bilingual parallel corpus and the following findings are reached.First,Holmwood adopts the translation strategy of source-culture centeredness at the lexical and syntactic level,which reflects her tendency to abide by ethics of fidelity.On the lexical level,she mainly employs transliteration and literal translation to render most wuxia-related,religious and medical culture-loaded words;on the syntactic level,she tends to keep syntactic features like compound sentences and parallelism as much as possible.By doing so,target readers can not only construct an overall concept of the wuxia world but also feel the charm of the Chinese language and wuxia culture.Second,in order to improve the readability of the translation,Holmwood also adopts the strategy of target-culture centeredness with specific approaches including adjusting the internal structure of article chapters and illustrations,adding peritexts,deleting some historical and cultural information,changing the speech and thought presentation and translating fight scenes in a streamlined way.By doing so,the translation achieves the effect of appropriately controlling the density of cultural information while also accelerating the narrative,thus reflecting her emphasis on cultural exchange and the tendency to observe ethics of communication.Third,after combing through relevant interviews,it is found that the dual identity of translator and literary agent as well as the introduction of She Diao Ying Xiong Zhuan gives Holmwood a unique and profound understanding of translation,cultural exchange and translator’s responsibility,which can indicate her ethical appeal of promoting cultural dialogue and further explain her trade-off when the other two ethical modes conflict.In general,although the translation has some inadequacies,it has important practical significance for promoting the overseas dissemination of Chinese martial arts novels and culture.