A Study On Jeffrey C. Kinkley's Translation Strategies In Border Town

As the professor of Chinese history in St. John University, American sinologist Jeffrey C.Kinkley has published in succession several works and thesis about Shen Congwen as well as Xiang xi culture, among which the famous ones involve the Odyssey of Shen Congwen, Society and Culture in Shen Congwen's works and China in Shen Congwen's works. Therefore, Kinkley has been regarded as "the first sinologist conducting a research on Shen Congwen" and Kinkley's version of Bian Cheng is the latest one after the versions of Ching ti and Robert Payne, Glays Yang and Yang Xianyi, published in2009. According to the current materials at disposal, the first two version haven been much studied, especially Glays Yang's one while few attention has been paid to Kinkley's one since it came out. The thesis analyzes the translation strategies in Border Town systematically from a unique perspective, making an attempt to fill the gap of this issue.As a Chinese novel well known in the West and the most pure novel in Chinese modern literature, Border Town written by Shen Congwen describes a dreamland of Xiang xi that shows typical Chinese culture by romantic and ideal tone. Therefore, how to render the mysterious but traditional Xiang xi culture in translation has been the focus of scholars at home and abroad. Besides, Nida divides cultural elements in translation into five types, namely, linguistic culture, material culture, social culture, religious culture and ecological culture.Domestication and foreignization are translation strategies employed by translator to deal with cultural difference. Generally speaking, during the course of translating, the selection of translation strategies in not only determined by a translator's subjective elements, such as his or her translating purpose, cultural attitude and ideological concepts, but also influenced by some objective elements, such as the text typology of the original, reader's expectations and the historical context.This thesis focuses on three questions as follows:(1) what translation strategies Kinkley has selected to deal with cultural elements in translation;(2) in what way this strategy reflects;(3) why does Kinkley adopt such kind of translation strategy? The research is conducted in form of proposing phenomenon——explaining phenomenon. Firstly, materials about Xiang xi culture are picked out and classified into three aspects of material, social and religious cultures to present frequency distribution for use of domestication and foreignization in form of linguistic data. Then a conclusion is that Kinkley adopts foreignization as the main strategy and domestication as supplementary one when dealing with cultural elements in translation Bian Cheng. then some typical examples of Chinese and English corresponding representing Xiang xi culture have been chosen and analyzed to demonstrate the conclusion.Then this thesis attempts to explore the subjective and objective reasons about why Kinkley employs such translation strategies. First, the author analyzes the subjective elements from Kinkley himself in terms of his translation purpose, cultural attitude and ideological concepts. Vermeer considers that translator with different purposes will select different translation strategies. Kinkley in the Odyssey of Shen Congwen expressed explicitly that he renders this novel in order to make western readers known better Shen and Xiang xi culture; According to Zohar's polysystem hypothesis, the translators in strong literary polysystem tend to apply domestication strategy and thus produce translations characterized by superficial fluency, while in a weak culture foreignizing strategy or resistant translation prevails. With the promotion of China's international position and interest from sinologists, Kinkley's version compared to the first two tends to select foreignization as the main strategy; Lefevere argues that the selection of translation strategy is related to translator's ideology. Thus, the equal communication between western world and China Kinkley holds and his great contribution to study on Chinese culture demonstrate the conclusion.Moreover, the author takes the text typology of the original, reader's expectations and the historical context into consideration. Newmark proposes six functions of text (informative, expressive, phatic, aesthetic and metalinguistic functions) as well as semantic translation and communicative translation, and the former suits for expressive text, for which foreignization is adopted. Bian Cheng belongs to expressive text and thus, foreignization is wide-used in it; Based on reception aesthetics of Jauss and Iser, readers'horizon of expectation (knowledge, cognitive structure and education background) plays an important role in translation. With the deepening of communication between China and western world, scholar and readers abroad demand higher and eager to acquire the original flavor of the translation. Thus, foreignization turns to the main-stream form reader's expectation and the cultural communication between Chinese-English world; Furthermore, the historic context such as, the cultural turning of translation, the revaluation of foreignization in western translation circle and the emerging of "Panda" and "penguin" books that expert in introducing Chinese literatures should be taken into account and pays the way for the selection of foreignization.This thesis consists of six parts in all. Chapter One comes into being as a prelude for the entire thesis. Background, research questions, method and outline are first introduced. Chapter Two provides a literature review, mainly introducing the lifetime of Kinkley and the previous studies on Biancheng. In addition, the conceptions and development of domestication and foreignization are combed to explain connotations on structural and cultural levels. Chapter Three investigates the translation strategy adopted by Kinkley in translating Border Town by analyzing the original samples and those corresponding ones. In order to strengthen the grounds of argument, a linguistic data is built to indicate that the frequency of domestication and foreignization adopted in translating three different cultures and a conclusion can be made:foreignization is wide-used in rendering Bian Cheng. Chapter Four refers to the subjective elements influencing Kinkley's Strategy, including the purpose of translator, the cultural attitude of translator and the ideological concepts of translator. Chapter Five discusses the objective factors that have great impacts on the translation of Border Town from three aspects:the text typology of the original, the reader's expectation and the historical background of translation. Chapter six summarizesthe general ideas of the whole thesis and further proposes the limitations in this research as well as the suggestion and expectation for further studying.In spite of some flaws in conveying cultural information, as a foreign scholar, Kinkley sets a good example in skillfully adopting translation strategies to introduce Chinese Culture to the Western World, and especially has the great guiding significance in communications between China and the Western world in today's globalization.