A Study On The Variations In John Mitiford’s English Version Of Louis Cha’s Lu Ding Ji

Lu Ding Ji is the last novel of Louis Cha. In1997, the famous sinologist JohnMinford who once co-translated Hong Lou Meng (《红楼梦》) with David Hawkes (thelast forty chapters) rendered it into English. However, as martial arts fictions are differentfrom the usual fictions, the unique Wuxia vocabulary and movement terms make it harderto be translated into English. Besides, the China-oriented chauvinism reported in the bookmakes the English readers feel uneasy to accept. However, it is meaningful to study theEnglish version of Lu Ding Ji for it is the last novel of Louis Cha. Based on the theory ofliterature variation studies, supplemented by the rewriting translation theories, this thesisdiscusses the variations in the English version of Lu Ding Ji and the cultural reasonsbehind the variations.The variations in this thesis refer to the omissions, additions, cultural filtering andcultural misreading in the English version of Lu Ding Ji. As "Xia","Jianghu" and "Yi"are the essence and soul of martial arts fictions, this thesis will firstly analyze thevariations of the three words in the English book. Instead of martial arts fictions inChinese literature, there is chivalry culture in western literature. But the two concepts arenothing the same in essence. We find out that the variations are made because thetranslator is restricted by his own chivalry culture tradition and the target readers’ culturalpsychology, so he chooses, transforms and filters the source information intentionally orunintentionally. Secondly, this thesis analyses the omissions of feudal superstition terms,mistranslation of Wugong movements and variations in modes of speech presentation ofthe leading character Wei Xiaobao’s utterance. We find out that as the translator cannotput himself into the cultural background of source text, he has to interpret the sourceinformation according to his own literary tradition. Besides, it shows that the translator’sideology also manipulate the translation process. At last, this paper conducts an in-depthdiscussion of the variations in the text structure of the English text. As the East and Westshare different standards of poetics, the western mainstream poetics tends to reject otherpoetics. From the above discussion, this thesis comes to the following conclusion: theEnglish version of Lu Ding Ji is actually the conflict and discourse between two differentlanguages and cultures which have profound divergences and it is an Englishized text. Through discussion, this thesis hopes that it would make the followingcontributions: firstly, we hope to study the law of translation activity from a newperspective dynamically rather than statically, connectedly rather than isolatedly.Secondly, we hope that it would provide some reference and thought to the latertranslation and transmission of a special literature type with Chinese characteristics—martial arts fictions. Thirdly, we hope to enrich the literary translation research which istext-centered.