Gender Difference And Translation-with Reference To Two Chinese Versions Of Wuthering Heights

Taking a look at the human developing history, feminist translation came into being in the 1990s, which is the result of the development of feminism movement in cultural field. It gave fresh impetus to the cultural turn of translation. It challenged the traditional translation theory in many aspects, such as the translator's status, the relationship between the source text and the target text, and translation standard. Until now more and more attention were paid to feminism and translation. It is gradually realized that this is a significant and independent research field. Feminism, once taken into the vision of academics, will exert great influence on the habitual angles and the approaches to look at things. And feminism, once recommended into the research of translation, will bring new perspectives to the research of translation.This thesis will first probe into the relationship among feminism, gender and translation by tracing the historical metaphoric of gender and translation. In order to make women's voice heard and women's body seen and manifest the female discourse in the translation, feminist translators put forward their unique viewpoints and created the feminist translation theories. Feminist translators adopt the translation strategies of supplementing, prefacing and footnoting, and hijacking to deal with the source text. They set emphasis on the treason, exert to abandon the male expressing style and change the gender discourse in order to make the women's voice heard, let women manipulate the translation and text, and subvert the men's control.This thesis takes the Wuthering Heights translated by Yang Yi and Fang Ping as the researching case. The thesis analyses the embodiment of feminism in translation. Comparative and textual analyses are used in the case study. Through the comparison of the relationship between male and female, source text and target text, writer and translator, it is found that Yang Yi sometimes manifests her female identity naturally. But Yang Yi inclines to consistently adopt standard patriarchal language in most cases. In addition, she understands the source text from a male perspective and so she uses words connotatively with cultural bias against women. Since Yang Yi understands the source text from a male angle and then writes it in a standard patriarchal language, she formalizes a male identity in her version. On the contrary, Fang Ping adopts the female discourse a lot in his translation version in order to embody the feminist awareness.We can find that translators have abandoned the extreme attitude for gender difference and freed themselves from the binary oppositional pattern. They try to eliminate the human oppositional sides, such as Yin and Yang, masculine and feminine, perceptual and rational, confusion and clearness and etc. and pursue a kind of essential complementary relationship. Similarly, a kind of equal relation based on mutual understanding should be established between the source text and the target text. They should rely on each other and belong to each other mutually. In the process of translation, translators should exert to change the roles with the writers. Men translators can master the feminine beauty in the feminine works and women translators can reflect the masculinity in the masculine texts. If so, the translation must be the harmonious one. By doing this, they can build a kind of androgyny ideal in translation field. The androgyny ideal not only supplies a braw new perspective for the translation research but also stimulate the multi-direction development of translation.