Why Zhang Ailing's Self-Translation And Rewriting Of Jinsuo Ji Were Not Well Accepted In The West

It is no doubt that Zhang Ailing is one of the most outstanding female writers in the history of modern Chinese literature due to her excellent and unique literary creations. Scholars often attach great importance to her creative writings and her researches on Chinese classic novels, but ignore her achievements in literary translation. Actually Zhang translated a great number of novels, essays and poems into Chinese and English. She also translated and rewrote her own works. This paper makes a study on her self-translation and rewriting of her novel Jinsuo Ji (1943), which is adored as her masterpiece. In 1955 she went to the United States to restart her career as a writer of English fiction. On the basis of Jinsuo Ji she rewrote in English a long story, which was named The Rouge of the North. It was first refused by an American press, and then was published by a British press in 1967. In fact it was not well accepted by reviewers and general readers at that time, for which she subsequently gave up hope of becoming a professional writer of English and turned instead to work on several other Chinese projects. A few years later, Zhang translated Jinsuo Ji into English, named The Golden Cangue, which was collected in Twentieth-Century Chinese Stories edited by C.T.Hsia in 1971. This one was also received coldly since it was published.Zhang's two English versions about Jinsuo Ji are neither well accepted by the English-speaking readers. Based on this fact, the paper tries to explore the implied reasons from the perspective of Medio-translatology. Medio-translatology requires putting her translation into the specific historical cultural context, and discusses the cultural reasons behind it, then exposes how ideology, culture and literary concepts of target-language cultural system manipulate and influence the phenomenon of literary translation.Therefore, in the first chapter the author introduces the research background, research objective and motivation, research significance, and the structure of the paper. There are mainly two parts in the second chapter: the first part is about Zhang Ailing's life and works, including the review of Zhang Ailing's life, Zhang as a bilingual writer and translator, the reason why the author chooses Zhang Ailing, and synopsis of Jinsuo Ji and its related versions; and the second part consists of previous researches on Zhang Ailing and previous researches on her translation. The third chapter consists of the definition, origins, basic theories and significance of Medio-translatology, Then the forth chapter is mainly about the analysis of the factors like ideology, culture, and translator's strategy influencing the acceptance of Zhang's two English versions. Thus the concluding chapter naturally covers the implications and limitations of the research.