Eileen Chang As A Translator And The Translation Of Her Fiction

Although Eileen Chang made no small stirs in the Chinese literary circle, her role as a bilingual writer and translator has been left obscured. As Chang lived most of her adult life in the United States and wrote for the English readers fiction of "Chinese reality", she was confronted with a lot of problems confronting a translator in her creative writing. When she translated these stories and novels back into Chinese latter, she was actually "translating the translated". This extends our view toward translation. As an author-translator, she made lots of revisions during the translation of some of her works under the safety of authorship, and a careful study over these revisions showed her profound understanding of the two languages and cultures, which is of no small significance to our translation practice.As most of her works are set in Shanghai and Hong Kong, both accommodating various races and cultures, her translation leads us to the problem of cultural and linguistic "hybridity", which remained an unturned stone for translation studies. This paper has only discussed two small questions, namely, mimicry and linguistic hybridity under this huge title, which are relevant to the study of Eileen Chang's fictional translation. Yet its study could be of great implications to translation studies in the Post-Babelian age ushered in with the increasing cultural exchanges and globalization.Last but not least, as an extremely talented writer in using language to create images and driving home sentiments, her translation has extended our view to how expressive a translation could be while remaining faithful to the original.