Hybridity In Zhang Ailing's Self-translation--the Golden Cangue Analysed In Light Of Reception Aesthetics

With her unique artistic enchantment appealing to all and profound understanding and insight of human nature, Zhang Ailing (1920-1995) occupies an important position in modern Chinese literary history and has been kindling "Zhang Ailing fever" among Chinese readers in the mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Her representative work—Jinsuo Ji, acclaimed to be "the greatest novelette in the history of Chinese literature" and "one of the most beautiful work harvested in literary circle", has aroused great interest of readers and scholars. Commissioned by C.T. Hsia, a literary critic, she translated it into English, entitled The Golden Cangue, which is included in Twentieth-century Chinese Stories published in 1971.Cultivated in Chinese and Western cultures and with her prime days spent in two oriental metropolises—Shanghai and Hong Kong, Zhang Ailing, the bilingual writer and translator, makes a perfect combination of modern Western ideas and writing techniques with traditional Chinese literature, freely harmonizing conflicting elements, popular and avant-garde, classic and modernistic. Just because of that, both her literary creation and her translation feature high degree of hybridity. However, her strong awareness of and concern about the parent culture and the reader attribute to the fact that during her translation process, Zhang on the one hand makes every effort to keep intact the style of the original and transplant the "heterogeneous elements" into her translation, and on the other takes the horizon of expectations and reception dimensions of the TL readers into full consideration. What she strives for is to achieve artful balance between them. Her translation style and tendency in this connection put themselves into full display in her English self-translation of Jinsuo Ji and has become the research object of this thesis.Hybridity is acknowledged to be conducive to promoting cross-cultural communication, breaking binary oppositions between domestication and foreignization, resisting against cultural hegemony of some imperialist counties; it also contributes to creating aesthetic distance and changing the horizon of expectations of TL readers, thus facilitating formation and acceptance of new standards and rules. Despite all the merits of hybridity, the handling of its degree has become a huge challenge to translators. Without appropriate treatment of it, hybridity would turn out to be the reading obstacle for TL readers. Therefore, translators should give the following issues priority: how to harmonize hybridity; which heterogeneous elements could be maintained; what compensatory strategies could be taken to facilitate the reception of those elements.Proceeding from those issues, this thesis conducts micro and macro researches on The Golden Cangue in light of Reception Aesthetics, summarizing hybrid characteristics of the original and its translation and exploring manipulative strategies adopted by the translator to harmonize hybridity. On the micro level, the thesis carries out a descriptive analysis of cultural, linguistic and literary hybridity prevailing in the translation. On the macro level, the thesis stays focused on analyzing respective translation strategies the translator employs to harmonize cultural hybridity, linguistic hybridity and literary hybridity and the influence of those strategies on TL readers' reception, depending on Reception Aesthetics' key concepts of horizon of expectations, aesthetic distance and changing horizons as its theoretical support.Zhang Ailing's translation practice reveals that she regards hybridity as a historical paradigm, and hence adopts different translation strategies and compensatory methods in accordance with different characteristics and reception dimensions of cultural, linguistic and literary hybridity.The thesis makes a research on hybridity and compensatory strategies employed by the translator in The Golden Cangue to facilitate its reception in the cultural environment of TL from the perspective of readers' reception with a view to providing materials to the holistic research on Zhang Ailing from the aspect of translation and a creative angle for the study on hybridity in literary translation.