Comparative Studies On The Two English Translations Of Hao Qiu Zhuan

Among Chinese saga novels, Hao Qiu Zhuan is the first one to have been translated into western languages. Based on theories related with functional translation, communicative translation, semantic translation, and foreignized or domesticated translation, this paper compares the two most influential English versions of Hao Qiu Zhuan, namely, Thomas Percy's Hau Kiou Choaan and John Francis Davis' The Fortunate Union. The two translators had different purposes for their translation and expected their version to have different functions, and consequently they adopted different strategies. For Percy, Hao Qiu Zhuan was no literature according to European standard. He therefore did not treat it as literature but aimed to make an encyclopedia of China out of this novel. Thus, he generally preferred to foreignize the basic cultural images of Chinese elements through transliteration and inevitably, made some mistakes due to his insufficient competence of Chinese. Linguistically, he substituted English dynamic equivalents for Chinese words and phrases, roughly handled the sentence structures, deleted difficult passages and removed all the stylistic features of the novel. By contrast, with his proficiency of Chinese, Davis treated the novel as a piece of literature work and sought to reproduce the refined expressions, the concise sentence structures and the impact of rhetorical devices of the source text as well as the unique literature style of the Zhanghui novel. In order to preserve the beauty of the Chinese language and the aesthetical effect of Hao Qiu Zhuan, he allowed no spoilage from any "ill-looking" and "worse-sounding" words produced through transliteration and he chose to domesticate some basic Chinese cultural images. It is meaningful to notice that obviously the domestication strategy that Davis adopted did not follow his reputation as "the most unpopular governor of Hong Kong" while the Percy's version, which has been much touted, is colored with Orientalism defined by Said with Percy's dominant attitude towards Chinese literature and ill opinions of Chinese people.