Eileen Chang's Translationof The Old Man And The Sea Froma Perspectiveof Feminist Translation Theory

In recent years, Eileen Chang has been attracting increasing attention as a translator in academic circle. Investigation shows that many of the researches are of preliminary nature: some of them summarized Eileen Chang career as a translator; others focussed on Eileen Chang's peculiar translation style ? self-translation and intralingual translation. Some of the American literary works that Eileen translated, The Old Man and the Sea, for example, drew little attention. The Old Man and the Sea was translated by Eileen Chang when she was working for a U.S News Press in Hongkong in 1952, and it was Eileen who first translated that work into Chinese, almost immediately after it was published in the same year. There are altogether over 20 Chinese versions of The Old Man and the Sea since it was published in 1952; the versions translated by Hai Guan, Wu Lao, Huang Yuanshen and Li Xiyin are high regarded and popularly read. It seems that most readers had failed to notice Eileen's female idendity and to understand her feminist orientation to translation. This is of a great regret not only for the translation studies of the The Old Man and the Sea, but also for the further study of Eileen Chang as a translator.Western feminist translation theory is a product of the alliance between feminism and translation studies.As a branch of it, feminist intervention translation emphasizes on how feminist translators use language as a manipulative tool to intervene in the creation of meaning in the target culture. There are three specific strategies of Western feminist translation summarized by Luis von Flotow: supplementing, prefacing and footnoting, and―hijacking‖, and other strategies.Taking The Old Man and the Sea as the subject for reseach, the author has made an attempt to make a delicate contrastive studies on the three Chinese versions of that work translated by Wu Lao, Huang yuanshen, and Hai Guan, from the perspective of feminist translation theory, in the hope of finding out which feminist intervention strategies have been adopted for the translation of that work, and that how Eileen has fulfilled her translation ideal through the application of feminist intervention strategies.In this thesis, the author attempts to make some creative researches on the following aspects: 1) the research subject in this thesis is The Old Man and the Sea translated by Eileen Chang; this is the first time that The Old Man and the Sea has been analyzed from the perspective of feminist translation theory; 2) summarizing the feminist intervention strategies adopted by Eileen Chang's with her characteristics; 3) attempting to apply the feminist translation theory to English-Chinese translation practice, which is expected to make contribution to both deepening the feminist translation theory, and broadening the view of the researches on Eileen's translation works.