Translator's Gender Identity In Yang Bi's Chinese Version Of Vanity Fair-from The Angle Of Feminist Translation Studies

As a result of women's movement in the West, gender issues have become entangled with issues of language, and it is interesting that translation has also long been compared to women by the famous metaphor of les belle infidels. Feminism brings the aspect of "gender" into translation studies, broadens the studies of translator's subjectivity, and gives fresh impetus to the "cultural turn" of translation studies, and translation studies have developed as a part of the more general turn toward cultural studies.With respect to the use of language, it is observed that linguistically, women are encouraged to use expressions that suggest triviality, and to use forms that express uncertainty concerning what they are talking about. However, as far as language style is concerned, women's language tends to be more standard than men's. Six categories of language use are proposed by Lakoff to be regarded as to be sharply differentiated by the sex of the speaker: lexical distinctions such as color terms, strong versus weak expletives, "women's" versus "neutral" adjectives, tag questions, question intonation with statement syntax, and strength of directive speech acts.The Chinese version of Vanity Fair translated by Yang Bi in the 1950's, has long been universally praised as a classic. Not only did famous scholars contribute various comments and analysis on her translation from an academic angle, common readers practically regard her translation as a final version. In the early 20^th century, as various popular "-ism" was introduced to China, feminist thoughts with the core of "equality of men and women" was also embraced, and its direct influence even brought into life the Chinese women literature. Therefore Yang Bi's style of translating may be inevitably influenced by certain values and customs in the contemporary society. To make a comparison, another Chinese version of Vanity Fair has to be chosen to discuss, and it is a version newly published in February, 2006, which is translated by Peng Changjiang, a professor of Hunan Normal University.Through a detailed analysis of Yang Bi' s version of Vanity Fair, it is found that Yang's wording is less formal or standard than Mr. Peng, which is not in accordance with or even contradictory to the sociolinguists' assertion that women tend to use standard forms of language in order to claim higher status than they are entitled to. And during the comparison, it is also found that Yang Bi frequently uses Sentence Final Particles, and shows an obvious preference of interrogative sentences, reduplication phrases, while avoiding vulgar or coarse words. Other aspects revealing the translator's gender identity includes her way of describing various appearances, and even the wording of the female characters' names. It can be concluded that Yang Bi was not ready to submit to the patriarchal language, she didn't conceal her real gender with a mask of standard language forms, nor pretend to speak in a man's tone. She just freely spoke in a feminine tone and out of her own habit, revealing her gender identity quite naturally and unaffectedly.As feminist translators insist that translated text should be endowed with independent value of existence, and translation be regarded as a kind of writing practice. Its objective is not to create regulations and criterion for judging good or bad translations, but to construct the gender identity of translator subject through the process of knowledge transference and transportation, and to "make women visible and resident in language and society". The study of Yang Bi' s translation of Vanity Fair shows she does make herself visible and resident where she can, and the manifestation of her translator's gender identity happens to be in accordance with the objective of feminist translation.In order to provide further support for this thesis, and to get a general understanding of average readers' attitude or response to the manifestation of translator's gender identity, the author of this paper made a research on Yang Bi' s manifestation of translator's gender identity in her version of Vanity Fair. The means adopted in this survey is questionnaire. To make it more feasible as an academic survey, 100 English majors are chosen as the subjects, and the research result shows that Yang Bi' s manifestation of her gender identity can be admitted by average readers and thus it provides factual support for this paper.