Reference Translation Of Chinese Prose In Han Suyin International Translation Contest(2000-2021) From The Perspective Of Empathy

The Han Suyin International Translation Contest currently boasts the contest with the longest-running,largest-scale,and most extensive influence in China,whose reference translations are repeatedly discussed and summarized by the review experts and thus are authoritative and analyzable.Prose,renowned for its “scattered form but convergent spirit”,frequently relies on the scene,object or thing depicted to express sentiments.The sentiments often involve the author’s perception and thinking about life or views on social phenomena.Indeed,conveying the sentiment and the spiritual connotation of the original text accurately is indispensable to a high-quality translation.Nevertheless,the research on empathy in literary translation is not comprehensive as the research on culture,style,and beauty.Moreover,most scholars focus on the role or strategies of empathy.Research on the degree of empathy in translation is inadequate.Therefore,this thesis selects the 10 Chinese proses and their reference translation from 2000 to 2021 in Han Suyin International Translation Contest as the research object,aiming to evaluate the reference translation by analyzing various empathetic language phenomena.And three research questions are raised:(1)What are the manifestations of the accretion of empathy in the reference translation?(2)Does the ablation of empathy exist in the reference translation? If exists,what are the main reasons for it? If not,what are the reasons for high-frequency accretion of empathy?(3)What empathetic features are there in the reference translation?In accordance with the definitions and representations of empathy in the previous studies,this thesis summarizes two categories and six subcategories of language phenomena to identify empathy,namely,the empathy in content including concretization,animacy,the shift of person;the empathy in the form including phonological rhythm,conversion of voice and syntactic manipulation,which are highly related to empathy according to the illumination of Tan Yesheng(2009).Taking these language phenomena as the criteria to identify empathy,this thesis adopts the method of corpus retrieval and repetitiously manual retrieval based on the self-built English-Chinese parallel corpus with the total capacity of14649 characters and words to analyze the frequency of these linguistic phenomena in the reference translation and their empathic effects.Among the 275 pairs of parallel sentences,the study found that a total of 164 points reflect the reference translation’s empathy,of which 146 reflect the accretion of empathy in the reference translation compared with the original work,and 18 reflect the ablation of empathy in the reference translation.By summarizing 146 language phenomena reflecting the accretion of empathy,it is found that the concrete manifestations of it in the reference translation are as follows: the usage of rhythmic sound to encode empathy;the usage of specific words to embody empathy;the usage of specific sentences to reflect empathy;the extension of empathy object;the shift of psychological distance.By analyzing the language phenomena reflecting the ablation of empathy,it is found two main reasons for it: on the one hand,out of the consideration of overall effect of the translation,the translator chooses to satisfy equivalence in meaning or function first and puts aside empathetic equivalence;on the other hand,the reference translation encounters empathetic obstacles,which is exemplified by the instances without overcoming the empathetic obstacle in language,culture and reception and another translation version is given.Finally,this thesis reckons that the reference translation being studied is favorable,with the features of various empathetic approaches,different empathetic attributes and proper balance between empathy and other elements in translation.From the perspective of empathy,this thesis analyzes the sentimental delivery of the C-E reference translation of proses in the Han Suyin International Translation Contest,focusing on the phenomenon of the accretion and ablation of empathy.This thesis discusses the concrete manifestations of the accretion of empathy,explores the main reasons for the ablation of empathy and concludes the empathetic features of the reference translation.Hopefully,the thesis could benefit the study of the reference translation in the Han Suyin International Translation contest.