A Comparative Study Between Western And Chinese Feminist Translation

In the 1960s, influenced by the second wave of feminist movement, feminists began to turn their attention from social movement to linguistics and translation. They find that since the ancient times, translation and women have been regarded as the subordinates of the original work and men respectively. People tend to use words like graceful, faithful which are used to describe women to depict translation. To feminist translators, translation and women are both treated unfairly by the society. Translation is regarded as a weapon by feminist translators to change women's invisible status, fight against sexism and advocate the equality between women and men.Feminist translation came into being in the context of the popularity of deconstruction and feminist literary criticism. It plays the role of a bridge joining marginalized women and marginalized translation. Generally speaking, feminist translation practice can be divided into two parts: macroscopic practice and microscopic practice. Feminist translation theories mainly refer to the reformatory and radical translation theories.The innovation of this research is that it puts western feminist translation and feminist translation in China at an equal footing for the first time and makes a comparative study between them. There are five similarities between western and Chinese feminist translation: 1. They are motivated by an obvious political purpose; 2. They both subvert the traditional translation perspective; 3. They deconstruct the conventional binary opposition; 4. Rebuild the subjectivity of feminist translators; 5. Bring gender into translation studies.In differences, feminist translation in China starts very late. In translation strategies, gentle strategies are used. China's feminist translation mainly focuses on theoretical study. It seldom touches on practice and does not have a wide effect on China's translation studies.As to research methods, this thesis is mainly qualitative and comparative. The research hypothesis is that Chinese has feminist translation and it is quite different from that in the west. In the conclusion part of this thesis, the author summarizes the significance and the limitation and put forward some suggestions for future studies.