From Imitation To Reconstruction: A Critique Of Realia Translation In Anecdotes About Spirits And Immortals

Realia, words and collocations denoting entities of a national culture, exist in a large scale in one of the Chinese classic literature corpus, the masterpiece of Zhi-guai novel, Sou Shen Ji, comprising a body of the culture realities, the culture reality. With a comparative analysis of the extratextual factors in the ST (source text) and the TT (target text), it is clear that the receiving situation of the TT differs dramatically from that of the ST, which determines a different function for the translation with regard to the requirements of the new situation. The consideration for the reception of the TT receivers where the TT function is completed is an audience-oriented approach to translation which is based on the skopos theory. The function of the TT, or the skopos, is a communication of the national culture realities which are significantly embodied and directly denoted by the realia to the TT receivers. In a functional point of view of translation, intertextual coherence, a reflection of fidelity which is realized primarily through equivalence at form and content level, is subordinate to the realization of the TT function. As a masterpiece of the culturally distinctive genre of literature, the literary quality of Sou Shen Ji is itself a denotation of the culture reality, especially when the forms of realia are bound to the meanings of the entities they denote. It is in this sense that intertextual coherence is compatible with the skopos and is thus counted as one facet of the skopos. This aspect of the skopos is concerned with the preservation of the literary quality of the original in a static point of view. The accurate communication of the content of the culture realities constitutes second facet of the skopos. Two alternative ways to the accurate communication are the effective communication where the translator aims to have the TT receivers perceive the culture reality under their own cultural norms and the economic communication where the translator aims to communicate the general content without the specific color of the national culture. The two aspects of communication comprise the third and fourth facets of the skopos and the effect of the realization of the two facets in a translation process is the pragmatic functional equivalence. Such a process is an imitation of the national culture through reconstruction as the form and content of the original realia are changed and replaced with materials of otherness from the TL (target language) culture. Stating the skopos from the four aspects is answering to the criticism at the weakness of the skopos-related approach to translation quality assessment - the ambiguity of any skopos. The four facets of the skopos are inferred from the exhaustive analysis of the extratextual factors of the ST and the TT in comparison and postulated by the judgment of the translation quality through describing the effect of applying each translation strategy. It is with the comparative analysis of the translations of realia and the generalization of different proportions in applying five translation strategies that the English version of Sou Shen Ji (Anecdotes about Spirits and Immortals) is judged, in the framework of skopos-reteted approach, as a prosperous translation in the aspect of realia translation. The frequent use of descriptive translation, or the abundant descriptions of the realia in translation, leads to a successful mimicry of the cultural realities, whereas intertextual coherence in the primary concern of the original's form is neglected (if there is no compensation) and this case is reversed in the other English version (In Search of the Supernatural: The Written Record) as it prefers caiques rather than description. In many other cases, the translator has the TT receivers immediately perceive the culture realities according to their own cultural norms through approximate translation which focuses on the effective and economic communication where the precise content of the realities is substituted with familiar content in order to create a similar function of the realia, namely, a similar reaction of the TT readership as that of the ST readership in viewing the culture realities within their own cultural system. In the conventional view of realia translation, the criterion for a good translation is the preservation of the local and historical color realia embody. It is based on this idea that the distortion of the culture reality to different degrees in applying different strategies is generalized. However, in the framework of skopos-related approach to translation quality assessment, the thesis aims to include a dynamic view of the preservation of national color which is made possible by the dialectics of national culture, focusing on the requirements of the new receiving situation, or of the TT receivers. The preservation of national color in dynamics calls for a production of a dynamic literary quality of the translation. The thesis does not end here but goes on with an insight into the translator's mental spaces to explain the ways of translating the realia and the nature of the translation product, a mimesis by mimicry in a narrow sense and the mimicry as intercultural synthesis through reconstruction in a broad sense.