A Study On English Translation Of Jia Pingwa's Fictions(1978-2018)

At present,in the context of China's culture going-overseas strategy implemented by China to upgrade the country's soft power,Chinese literature,as a vital component of Chinese culture,its English translation has been placed in a very important strategic position.Especially Chinese New Era literature that comprehensively reflects China's society,politics,economy,and culture since the reform and opening,the English translation of which has surpassed any previous era in terms of investment and volume.However,a consensus in the academic circle is that the acceptance of the English version of Chinese New Era literature in the Anglo-American world is not so good as expected.Therefore,we should look for a typical translation case that can reflect the overall situation of the New Era literature translations so as to accumulate experiences and take lessons from it as well as provide support for Chinese New Era literature going-overseas.The English translation of Jia Pingwa's fictions has lasted for a long time(from 1978 to present).During this period,27 fictions have been translated into English.In addition,the translation channels and types are various.To a large extent,this illustrates the overall status and development of the English translation of Chinese New Era literature and is an important aspect for us to examine the overall situation of English translation of Chinese literature in the new era.However,the case study is currently neither enough comprehensive nor enough systematic.Researchers tend to pay attention to the pure language transformation between bilingual texts.They ignore that translating is an action that takes place in a specific historical stage and social context,between specific plural subjects,and within the logical field of specific ideas and goals.And this type of investigation cannot explain a lot of translation phenomena outside the language.Translation is not only a matter of language.Whether translated Chinese literature can be accepted by foreign readers is also not only a matter of pure language translation.Translation Studies of Cultural Approaches expand the scope of traditional translation studies and argue that translation studies should get out of the non-contextualized pure language studies.Besides,they extend the scope of translation studies to the more macro social-cultural level beyond the linguistic representation and focus on the constraints that affect translation production and acceptance as well as the role of translating in a specific era and society.The purpose of translation studies is no longer limited to providing rules for translators to follow but is to explain why to translate like this.Based on the theory of Translation Studies of Cultural Approaches,this dissertation makes a systematic investigation on the production and acceptance of the 40-year English translation of Jia Pingwa's fictions.The research scope turns from focusing only on the pure language transformation into multiple translation links,including pre-translation,translation and post-translation.The research content turns from providing the standard for “how to translate” into explaining “what and why to translate”,“how and why to translate in this way”and “how and why the translated version is accepted like this”,etc.Through the expansion of research scope and content,this paper aims to reveal the essence and causes of the production and acceptance of Jia Pingwa's translated fictions,so as to provide strategic references for how Chinese literature,including Jia Pingwa's novels,can effectively “go global” through translation.This paper is divided into seven parts:The “Introduction” part mainly addresses the origin of this research,the current research situation,theoretical basis,research thinking,methods and significance of English translation of Jia Pingwa's novels.The first chapter summarizes the general situation of the English translation and publication of Jia Pingwa's fictions during the 40 years from 1978 to 2018,including the translation genre,the publication time and method,the sources of translators and publishing institutions,etc.,and then analyzes the characteristics and development changes of them in four periods.The second chapter classifies the subject(sponsor,translator,publisher)of Jia Pingwa's fiction translation and probes into their natures and characteristics.It takes the initiator,the builder of the translation network,as the defining standard,to classify the main mode of production,and then analyzes the composition of subjects,the relationship between subjects,the discourse power of different subjects in the translation field.The third chapter analyzes the factors that contribute to the material selection of Jia Pingwa's fiction translations in different modes in combination with the social context of the times,the subject's motivation of material selection and the content of the source texts.The fourth chapter makes detailed statistics on the frequency of translation methods based on corpus of micro cultural information and its translation in each mode of the most explicit and direct reflection of Chinese culture in Jia Pingwa's novels,explores the tendency of translation strategies in different modes,and analyzes the causes of the translation strategies from the perspectives of the social context of the times,the translators and the non-translators.The fifth chapter investigates the acceptance status of Jia Pingwa's translated fictions produced in different modes in the English world from four dimensions,including how many libraries have collected the translated work,the sales ranking,the evaluation from both professional readers and common readers.It also analyzes the causes of acceptance effect from the angle of translation producing subject,selection of translation materials,translation strategies,professional readers and common readers.The “Conclusion” part concludes the findings of this paper,summarizes the enlightenment of Jia Pingwa's fiction translation on Chinese literature translation and its "going out",points out the research deficiencies and proposes research suggestions.In a word,the English translation of Jia Pingwa's fictions is a typical case reflecting the complicated situation of Chinese New Era literature translation,which is of great research value.This paper conducts a systematic study of the production and acceptance of the English translation of Jia Pingwa's fictions in different modes in the past 40 years.Some phenomena revealed in this paper are of great significance to explore the effective ways in translating Chinese New Era literature and to promote the efficient "going out" of Chinese literature.