William Lyell’s Strategy Of Decolonization In His Translation Of Ah Q Zhengzhuan

Postcolonial studies is a cultural studies on historical and global scale whichtakes into consideration such factors as language, history, nation, politics, gender,cultural relationship, etc.. It criticizes the cultural hegemony and puts forward theconcept of decolonization. Translation plays a crucial role in colonial andpostcolonial periods. The application of postcolonial theory in translation studiesenlarges its research vision and examines the essential characteristics of translationphenomena more profoundly. This thesis, after introducing postcolonial translationstudies and decolonial translation strategies, makes a research on the strategy ofdecolonization adopted by William Lyell in his translation of Ah Q Zhengzhuan fromthe perspective of postcolonial translation studies.The research shows that Lyell has a strong intention of decolonization and histranslation strategy is a typical decolonial translation strategy. The author claims thatdecolonial translation strategy refers to the strategy of consciously promoting theweak cultures and resisting cultural hegemony in the process of translating the worksof a weak culture into the strong culture. Its main feature is to preserve culturaldifferences and resist cultural assimilation or violent rewriting in the process oftranslation to enable the voices from the weak cultures to be heard on the internationalcultural stage so that members in the hegemonic cultures could contact the unfamiliarforeign cultures and get rid of their cultural centralism. Decolonial translationstrategy may further the process of decolonization and realize free and equalcommunication between cultures. Through the analysis of Lyell’s Ah Q–The RealStory the author finds that his translation is characterized with assimilation inlanguage and alienation in culture, which is just one of the main features of decolonialtranslation strategy. Lyell’s fluent translation enables the English readers to be in adirect contact with the true colors of the Chinese culture in their pleasant reading. Soit is of positive significance in decreasing the English readers’ misreading andmisunderstanding of the Chinese culture.Lyell’s translation strategy, though similar to Venuti’s foreignizing strategy inthat both are the strategy of decolonization, is quite different from the latter in severalaspects: First, Lyell tends to translate the Chinese works of such influential writers asLu Xun and Lao She while Venuti prefers to translate the works of the peripheral writers to resist the mainstream standards of the English culture. Second, Lyell tries toproduce translated works as faithful as possible to the originals while Venuti arguesfor being faithful to the differences between cultures but not to the originalsthemselves. Thirdly, Lyell tries to produce fluent translated works while Venuti resistsfluency but pursues discontinuity in translated works. Fourthly, Lyell tries to makehimself invisible in his translations and translate the Chinese works into English inthe way the Chinese writers write while Venuti, on the contrary, emphasizes thevisibility of translators in their translations. Lastly, Lyell aims his translations at thebroad common readers so that as many as possible English readers could understandthe Chinese culture by reading his translations while Venuti claims that goodtranslations should be minoritizing and focuses his attention on few educated elite.The author believes that, against the background of globalization, Lyell’stranslation strategy would be not only more effective but also more faithful inspreading foreign cultures, for the translated texts produced by such a strategy notonly facilitate the target readers’ acceptance of a foreign culture but also enable thesource culture to be spread in the target culture in a more faithful way. In this sense,Lyell’s translation affords a positive and instructive reference to our cultural output.The author argues that, as an important bridge of cultural transmission, literarytranslation should transfer the original culture as faithfully as possible in a linguisticform which accords with the target readers’ expectations. As for the Englishtranslation of the Chinese literary masterpieces, we should draw on Lyell’s decolonialtranslation strategy to present the Chinese culture to the Western readers in fluent andnatural English and make the voices from the Chinese culture heard in a better formon the international stage. Only by doing so, can we further the process ofdecolonization.