Female Characters And Crime Fiction Translation

As a literary genre,crime fiction has two distinctive characteristics.First,crime fiction abounds in realistic and detailed representations of specific cultures and societies.Second,it is dense with descriptions of violence and death.Since many works of crime fiction have not been canonized,their translators enjoy relatively high freedom.They often adopt a target-oriented domesticating approach to translation to attract as many readers as possible.Moreover,the intercultural dissemination of crime fiction involves the hybridity of cultural elements,which poses significant challenges to translators.The Dutch Sinologist Robert Van Gulik is known for his crime fiction writing.His Judge Dee series consists of sixteen novels and eight short stories involving a large number of fictional women,including female victims.Considering the large number of female characters and their various roles in Van Gulick’s crime stories,this thesis only examines 25 characters,including female victims and some other women closely related to the crimes.Most of these female characters are Chinese women,and others are of different ethnic groups or from other ethnic groups(Koreans,Arabians,and nomadic women from some ethnic groups on the northwestern border of China).Although these female characters are not the protagonists of the stories,they play an indispensable role in the crime stories.These female characters exhibit different personal characteristics(e.g.,physical appearances,personalities,social dialects,and social status).They play varied roles in the development of the stories and reflect,to some extent,Van Gulik’s preconceived ideas of traditional Chinese women and non-Chinese women.The Da Tang Di Gong An series,translated by Chen Laiyuan and his co-translators,were reprinted repeatedly in China and enjoyed popularity among Chinese readers.The translators adopted creative approaches to translation to recreate vivid images of the female characters,which deserves in-depth exploration.Drawing on previous studies regarding crime fiction translation,domesticating translation strategy,and translators’ creativity,this thesis compares and analyzes the representations of 25 female characters in Van Gulik’s Judge Dee series and Hainan Press’ s Da Tang Di Gong An series(2011),which have been understudied by Chinese scholars.This thesis focuses on the differences between the source and target texts,aiming to show the connection between the domesticating strategy and the translators’ creativity.Translators’ creativity is initially associated with talent and inspiration,which has been used as a synonym for a positive evaluation of translators’ behavior and decisions,especially their justifiable deviations from the source content.Creativity is often reflected in various shifts in the target texts(deviations and discrepancies),achieved by translators’ intentional omissions and additions and other strategies such as replacement,substitution,and obliteration.The Da Tang Di Gong An series followed a domesticating approach and employed various translation methods to serve the purpose of domestication.The textual shifts resulted can be viewed as evidence of the translators’ creativity.This thesis compares the representations of 25 female characters in Van Gulik’s Judge Dee series and the Da Tang Di Gong An series and argues that the Chinese translators’ creative rewriting mainly concerns two aspects.(1)Domestication of some female characters’ exotic and unconventional characteristics.Some female characters in Van Gulik’s stories display exotic,unconventional,and modernized features(e.g.,feminine consciousness,rebellious spirit)regarding their physical appearances,social dialects,personal skills,and personalities.Chen and his collaborators adopted a domesticating approach,eliminated exotic and unconventional elements,and obliterated some references to foreign settings and cultures.Imitating traditional Chinese literary works,the Chinese translators also domesticated the original representations by adding many cultural details typical of ancient Chinese women.As a result,rebellious women in the source texts were represented as submissive,fragile,and reserved ones in the target texts,reinforcing and representing the gender hierarchy and Confucian ideal of women in the Tang dynasty.(2)Rewriting violence-and death-related representations.Van Gulik minutely sexualized and sensualized female corpses and the violence inflicted on female characters.His representations reflect Western crime fiction’s tendency to use female corpses or violent scenes to attract readers.The Chinese translators,on the contrary,mitigated the level of violence in most cases and emphasized the agony of the female characters,representing beautiful,piteous,and fragile female victims.They also omitted some over-trivialized descriptions of female corpses.In the Da Tang Di Gong An series,the translators rewrote violence-and death-related representations to evoke as much sympathy as possible from Chinese readers and meet their aesthetic expectations.