On The Translation Of Oscar Wilde's Fairy Tales In China

Translation of children's literature is an important part of literarytranslation, yet it has long been neglected. As a matter of fact, fairy taletranslation for children is as difficult as, if not more difficult than, that foradults. Compared with the latter, an imbalance exists in translationpractice and theories for children's reading material, and its practice lackssystematic and in-depth theoretic instructions.Oscar Wilde has two collection books of fairy tales, namely TheHappy Prince and Other Tales, and A House of Pomegranates. In China, the first translation of his fairy tales is Zhou Zuoren's Anle Wangzi, whichis produced in the "May Fourth" period and is included in Exotic Stories, with the aim of infusing Western thoughts and changing the society forthe better. Zhou mainly adopts wen yah language style and intentionalliteral translation.In the post-liberation period, Ba Jin's Kuaile Wangzi Ji collectsWilde's all nine fairy tales, and uses it as a spiritual weapon to fightagainst evil side of western capitalism. His language is simple, colloquial, and retains rhetorical expressions for children. In terms of sentencestructures, it has the feature of Europeanization.In contemporary times, China's publishing market is flourishing, andchildren's reading material takes up diversified and systematiccharacteristics. Yi Xin edited and translated Wilde's fairy tales in his TheBest Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde. Its publishing prupose is to raise youngEnglish learners' study interest and improve their social and culturalaccomplishments.From the perspective of language style, these three representativeChinese translations of Oscar Wilde' fairy tales show the change fromwen yan language style to bai hua; and in terms of the group of target reader, they also change from previous unclear condition tochildren-centered. Based on documents of a large scare, a generalresearch is taken on Chinese translations of Wilde's fairy tales. At thesame time, an inclination is further drawn from the comparison of thesetranslations, i.e., fairy tales translation more and more highlightsreproduction of original childlike rhetorical expressions. The history ofthis one hundred years tells us that fairy tale translators are supposed tohave a pure heart like children and regard themselves as a young readerwhile translating. Fairy tale translators should always remember that theirtarget readers are children, whose reception ability and readingexperience are limited. They have to understand the children's disposition, to read the original text from the children's prospective, to appreciate itwith childlike innocence. Then they could really settle down totranslating the work with simple and vivid language that children canread and like.