Hybridity In The Translation Of Immigrant Literature

In view of the multiplicity of cultural ascription and authorial identity, overseasChinese literature is ambuigiously positioned and its translation inevitably takes onmarks of rewriting and manipulation. An upsurge of interest in post-colonialtranslation theory, examining influence power relations, ideology and culturaldiscrepancies exert on translation, triggers animated discussions on the hybrid natureof translation and furnishes insights on constrcuting the translator’s identity amongcultural confrontations. The famed Chinese American woman writer Hungling Nieh,with her dedication to the “Iowa Writers’Workshop” and an active literary career, haswon international acclamation. Her classic novel Mulberry and Peach, Two Women ofChina, one of the “Top100Works of Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction”, and itsEnglish version which secured the American Book Award in1990, constitute maintexts for analysis in this thesis on hybridity in translation and the deep culturalmotivations and mechanism of power relations underlying that process.The concept of Hybridity has a long history constantly imbued with new meaningsin biology, linguistics, social science and cultural studies. With its highly liberatingforce, Hybridity has been favored to explicate identity formation of diasporacommunities. Chinese American female immigrants, after clashes, reconciliation andtranscendence of their in-between positions, are fabricating a brand new hybrididentity for spiritual reconstruction. This cultural positioning and the resulting hybridtexts per se facilitate discussions in this thesis which, whilst resting on textualanalysis and cultural theories, probes into factors impacting upon hybridity, illustratescases of hybridity in the text, proposes “strategic resistance” as an effectivecountermeasure and elaborates on the significance of hybridity in composing newidentity for translators when rendering immigrant literature and in the culturalconstruction of the target language.It is notable that this thesis, by taking into account interactions among authors,source texts, translators and translated texts, contributes to studies in literaryrendering through charting commonalities among immigrant literature translationwith an emphasis on the inter-relatedness among culture, literature and translationsituated in socio-political, historical and cultural specificities.