A Contrastive Study Of Huang Jianren’s And Zhu Wan’s Chinese Versions Of Lolita

Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), a Russian-born American, is one of the famousmodern writers in the English language, whose masterpiece Lolita earned him aworldwide reputation. Lolita was first published in1955in Paris and brought about aheated controversy in the British and French media over the issues of whether thenovel was a work of pornography and whether it should be banned. That the noveleventually becomes a literary classic confirms its great value and tremendous influence.Lolita has over20Chinese versions in China now, which makes it of great significanceto study its translation.Taking Chesterman’s models of translation ethics as a theoretical framework, thisthesis chooses the two most influential Chinese translated versions of Lolita, HuangJianren’s version and Zhu Wan’s version, for a contrastive study of the translationethics the two translators follow in their translating. Chesterman proposes fivetranslation ethics models, namely:(1) the representation model--to represent thesource text and the source author;(2) the service model--to meet the clients’requirements;(3) the communication model--to achieve cross-cultural understanding;(4) the norm-based model--to meet the expectations in the target culture;(5) thecommitment model--to ethical-oaths to perform professional ethics. Since bothrepresentation and norm-based models concern translation ethics at the micro level–for both concerns the relationships between the translator and text, as well as theconcrete translation strategies–this study adopts them as the theoretical basis.The research finds that the two translators follow different translation ethics andadopt different translation methods when they translate Lolita, which leads to differenteffects on their translations. Huang Jianren mainly abides by the norm-basedtranslation ethics in order to meet the expectation of the target culture.Correspondingly, she adopts the free translation method: she splits Nabokov’s famousobscure long sentences into vivid, brief, but powerful Chinese sentences; adopts thedomestication strategy in dealing with the cultural items; and clarifies the writer’simplied intention and the indistinct meanings. The free translation method allows herto produce a smooth, vivid translated version that is well-accepted by the Chinesereaders. On the contrary, Zhu Wan mainly abides by the representation-orientedtranslation ethics, which determines his adoption of the literal and annotationtranslation method. He preserves the style of the source text by using complex and long sentences; adopts foreinization strategy in dealing with cultural items; andreserves the obscure and indistinct meanings. Such method brings the Chinese readersa faithful rather than smooth Lolita.This thesis does not aim to judge which of the two translated versions of Lolitais good or bad, but to make an as objective as possible contrastive analysis of themfrom the perspective of translation ethics.