On Four Chinese Versions Of Jane Eyre From The Perspective Of Feminist Translation

Luise von Flotow once argues: "The work of translation in an 'era of feminism', an era powerfully influenced by feminist thought, has had an acute effect on translation practice" (Flotow, 2004). Feminist translation theory gave fresh impetus to the 'cultural turn' of translation studies. In translation practice, feminist translators treat translation as a weapon against patriarchal society and stress the translating subject from the perspective of women. As a result, more and more scholars begin to probe into the relationship between feminism and translation and find the study necessary and useful.In this essay, the author tries to make a comparative study of four Chinese versions of Jane Eyre from the perspective of feminist translation theory, so that readers or audiences may appreciate the differences between men translators and women translators while dealing with the same source text and see how a woman translator obtains self-identity.Based on the previous study, this paper takes four versions—two by women translators and the others by men ones—as the object of study. Jane Eyre, Charlotte's masterpiece, full of feminine features, is often supposed to be the priority of feminist critics. The comparative study is made mainly at the linguistic level—lexical level and syntactical level—and at the level of feminist ideology. Such linguistic levels as use of hedges, sentence final particles, intensifiers, tag questions or interrogative questions, words/phrases with long pre-modifier and dashes are helpful to reveal translators' female identity. Rearrangement of sentences reflects women's womanhandling in the version and extensive use of exclamatory sentences women translators' strong will to express women emotion. The replacement of derogatory terms by neutral or commendatory ones shows women's determination to enhance women's status by means of language. Men translators, on the contrary, ignoring the feminine features, customarily employ derogatory terms to show men's superiority over women even if occasionally they force themselves to pay attention to the feminine features and make every effort to express them.In a word, feminist translation theory plays an important part in the study of the various versions of the same source text, especially by translators of the opposite sex. As a completely new discipline, it needs further study to make more progress.