A Feminism-Based Systemic Approach To Chinese-English Literary Translation

Under the influence of feminism, feminist translation is becoming a practice fortranslators with a feminist tendency or gender consciousness. Accordingly, relevant studies ofit have been conducted and have made evident progress in recognizing its nature andcharacteristics and in developing appropriate rules and strategies for it. These studies,however, are often handicapped by a lack of consideration of more contextual factors and alack of integrated theoretical frameworks and thereby necessitate more comprehensive studies.Under the guidance of Jia Zhengchuan’s Dialectical Systemic View of Translation, on thebasis of feminist theory of translation and feminist stylistics, with authentic cases ofgender-conscious translation as examples, and through a systemic methodology integratingdeduction and induction and analysis and synthesis, this thesis carries out an integrated studyof, and establishes a feminism-based systemic approach to, Chinese-English literarytranslation.The approach thus established consists of two conceptual and two operational levels. Onthe conceptual levels, it comprises a feminism-based systemic notion and characterization ofthe object of study: Chinese-English literary translation is generally a complex feminist orgender-sensitive activity of replacing a Chinese literary text with a dialectically equivalentEnglish literary text; being internally composed of source text writer, source text reader,translator, target text reader, source text, target text, feminist consciousness, rules, strategiesand other constituents with a mostly nonlinear structure; being externally conditioned bysituational and socio-cultural contexts especially those of Chinese gender culture, andperforming linguistic, artistic, cognitive, psychological, social, cultural and other functionsespecially the function of protecting the status and rights of women; and temporally exhibitingitself as a process of feminist source text reception and target text production.Chinese-English literary translation is characterized by its particular overallinterconnectedness, internal integrity, external openness, and temporal dynamicity alwaysinvolving the dimension of feminist considerations. On the operational levels, the proposed approach consists of a feminism-based systemicrule and strategy system for Chinese-English literary translation: On one level, it is composedof four ordered rules corresponding to the four characteristics of Chinese-English literarytranslation, i.e., the overall interconnectedness rule (i.e.“Take all relevant including feministfactors into consideration”), the external openness rule (i.e.“Be aware of relevant especiallyfeminist external factors”), the internal integrity rule (i.e.,“Deal with all the internalcomponents including feminist factors integrally”)(which in turn comprises twocomplementary sub-rules, i.e. the feminist content rule—“Try to protect the status andrights of women in content”, and the feminist form rule—““Try to protect the status andrights of women in form”), and the temporal dynamicity rule (i.e.“Keep the dimension offeminism in mind through the whole temporal process”). On another level, it comprises fourprocedures consistent with the four rules, i.e., overall consideration and preplanning,contextual analysis and planning, structural analysis and design, and process analysis andoperation; and it consists of such strategies as supplementing, hijacking, prefacing, footnoting,over-translation, interpolation, deletion, and careful selection of words.The results of this study are of both theoretical and practical value. Firstly, they arehelpful to enhancing the translator’s capability of systemically and feministically viewing,and characterizing Chinese-English literary translation and flexibly choosing and applyingappropriate feminist translation rules and strategies for it and may thereby facilitate thegender-sensitive practice of Chinese-English literary translation. Secondly, this study mayalso compensate for the drawbacks of the existing studies of feminist translation.