A Comparative Study Of Two Chinese Versions Of Gone With The Wind From The Perspective Of Cultural Differences

By illustrating examples from Fu Donghua's and Huang Huairen's Chinese versions of Gone with the Wind, the thesis studies the advantages and disadvantages of different translation strategies concerning the cultural difference-related issues, attempting to help translators with their literary translation.The thesis consists of five chapters.Chapter 1 is the introduction of translation and the process of literary translation. It gives a general introduction to Gone with the Wind and the two Chinese versions, and it takes a brief review on previous researches on Gone with the Wind and different Chinese versions, and explains the objectives and methods of this research, that is, from the perspective of cultural differences.The discussion on the notion of culture in Chapter 2 is an effort to reveal the importance of awareness of cultural differences in literary translation, and it also gives the most authoritative definition of culture, and shows the categorization of cultural differences the thesis will be discussing, that is, the explicit culture, which includes material culture and institutional culture, and implicit culture, which indicates the mental aspect.The major part that includes Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 focuses on the differences in explicit culture and implicit culture respectively. It is pointed out that, when connected with literary translation, the explicit aspect of cultural differences lies mainly in language, and the implicit aspect, which is also the mental aspect of culture, lies in the way of thinking, the national psychology, and the styles of the author and the translator.The last chapter comes to five conclusions:Firstly, a translator should make the translation as natural as possible in the target language while retaining the nationality of the original itself.Secondly, the translated version of a literary work should be presented in a form that is easily accepted by modern readers while retaining the historical features of the original. Thirdly, the Chinese way of thinking is described as"figurative, human-oriented, comprehensive and sequential", and the western way of thinking is always described as"nonfigurative, nature-oriented, analytic and reversal". Fu and Huang have their own ways in dealing with the problems brought about by the differences. No matter what method a translator is going to take, he should always bear in mind that the final purpose of translation is to achieve"transmutation"and"dynamic equivalence".Fourthly, national psychology is embodied in the translation of religious names and proper names. National psychology should be kept while the readers'response theory should also be taken into consideration. As to the translation of proper names, over-domestication as Fu Donghua does should be avoided.Lastly, the style of the author should also be maintained by keeping the author's worldview, the author's artistic conception, and the author's special way of writing. The style of the translator should be expressed in a natural way without concealing the style of the author.Then the chapter also recognizes the true sense of creating the novel; it reveals that this thesis is only presented as a reference, which provides some advice for a translator in dealing with culture-related issues.