Intertextuality And Xu Yuanchong’s Allusion Translation In Romance Of The Western Bower

Chinese classical Drama is one of the most important components of Chinese culturalheritage. The play represented us a beautiful love story and featured in fresh rhythm andlyrics which contain large number of sayings, slangs, idioms and allusions. Wang Shifu’sRomance of the Western Bower is regarded as the one of the classic works in the history ofChinese classical drama. It is as well-known and popular in china as Shakespeare’s Romeoand Juliet in the West, and even it was written about three hundred years earlier thanShakespeare’s tragedy. Up to now, Romance of the Western Bower has received considerableattention from western readers and has been translated into numerous English versions. Of allthe English versions, Professor Xu Yuanchong’s translation has achieved the goal of faithfulto the original spirit and yet is regarded as the most welcome and complete version of theplay at home and abroad.The traditional translation practice and research has long focused on words, meaning’sand function’s one-on-one relationship, ignoring the relations within and outside thediscourse system. Thus the traditional view covers up the correlations among the relevantelements inside and outside of text as well as the meaning and function which the correlationsgenerate, while the intertextuality emphasizes the texts relations.In Kristeva’s opinion, every text is absorption and transformation of other texts. Theintertextual theory was introduced into translation studies by Hatim and Mason in theircollaborative work Discourse and Translation. They put forward that the intertextual theoryinherently connects with translation studies, which is the theoretical basis of the research. Studies in translation and intertextuality theory involve two major branches: one is to studytranslation and intertextuality from a theoretical angle and the other is to study and analyzedifferent translation methods to reproduce intertexts, with the latter being the focus of theresearch. There are macro-intertextuality and micro-intertextuality in the theory ofintertextuality. The former refers to the relationships of genres and styles among any texts.And the latter refers to relationship between one text and the other. It involves a single word,a phrase or a sentence that has the intertextual connection with that of other texts. These areactually the features of allusion. So the micro-intertextuality contributes a lot to allusiontranslation.As a device of intertextual reference, literary allusion can be regarded as a kind ofintertextual sign, because it typically presents the aspect of language sign, in other words, itcan evoke the linkage between text and intertexts. Therefore, Allusion translation is also anintertextual transformation. Allusion comprehension and interpretation need to understand theintertextual reference through intertextual sign: the translator has to trace an intertextualsignal to its pre-text and from the intertextuality space to evaluate intertextual reference,namely, semiotic status and informational status; finally, a decision is made to transfer theintertextual sign to target language by selecting one aspect of the status.The allusion translation should abide by the basic translation principle: faithfulness. InNord’s opinion,“intertextuality coherence”is the definition of“faithfulness”. Coherence isone of the crucial measurement evidences of translation quality. Due to the culturaldifferences, allusion translation should also comply with the principles of reproduction ofinformation. After systematic and detailed understanding, trimming and concluding to Xu’sEnglish version of Romance of the Western Bower, the thesis summarizes the specificmethods of allusion translation adopted by Professor Xu. At the meantime, the thesis analyzeswhether these methods are proper or not from the perspective of intertextuality. By and large,most of the English versions transmit the original information faithfully, but there are someversions need to improve.This thesis also proves the importance of intertextuality in translation to convey culturalconnotations and improve translation quality. The author concludes that intertextual theoryopens up a new viewpoint of thoughts and provides a new point of view in allusion translation. Combining translation with the intertextual theory is a new research field intranslation studies. This area is also full of challenges for Chinese-English translators for thatthere are big differences between the two languages and cultures. Nowadays, the researchershave to face the problems of how to overcome the differences and transfer intertextual signsat the same time make efforts to compensate and reconstruct intertexts.