A Study On Europeanization In Xu Chi’s Translation Of Walden

The Europeanized Chinese is mainly defined as the Chinese expressions whichare imitated or copied from western language structures as their reference. Wang Li,a famous Chinese linguist, has already made his remarks in his book on the relationbetween Europeanization and translation. He makes some comments thatEuropeanized Chinese is apt to derive from translated materials，while the translatedworks are the easiest to be Europeanized. Given that translation is the major factorthat causes Europeanization, this issue is attracting more and more attention ofscholars conducting their studies from the perspective of translation.In terms of Europeanization, the initial focus of the debate is on whether theChinese should be Europeanized or to what extent it could be Europeanized.Meanwhile, those scholars have shown their attitude towards Europeanizedtranslation. After Wang Li, more studies have been conducted by experts whogradually attach more importance on the Europeanized language itself, in otherwords, they are likely to analyze this phenomenon from the angle of linguistics, toexplore whether the Europeanized Chinese language is limited. Today, it is obviousto see that the work on Europeanization has already been expanded from linguisticangle to more new perspectives, including translation.Based on the studies conducted by previous scholars, the present thesis isconducted from the angle of translation, making specific analysis on the syntacticEuropeanization shown in Xu Chi’s version of Walden, an extraordinary prosewritten by Henry David Thoreau, one of the greatest writers and transcendentalists inAmerican literature in19thcentury. It combines the specific translated text and thetranslator’s style in the process of his translation, and summarizes all the majorEuropeanized features taking place in the total19chapters of the selected Englishversion in the form of quantity, through which the relationship between the degree ofEuropeanization and the acceptability of a translated text can be demonstrated.The major findings show that Europeanization is the most remarkable featurepresented in Xu Chi’s version, such as the excessive use of passive sentences,subjects and connectives, Europeanized sentence structure and sentence order. Allthese are closely connected with the translator’s special style in translating. At thesame time, it has proved there isn’t much negative effect caused by this style on thepublishment and acceptability of the selected version, which is generally considered as the earliest version with more republishing times and it is also the readers’ favoriteone.Europeanized translation is for the first time focused in the present study as theangle to make systematic analysis on Xu Chi’s version of the remarkable bookWalden, hoping to provide a new perspective for studying Xu Chi’s translation worksand even the acceptability of translation as a whole. It is supposed to be able toprovide some insights to translation process. In addition, both the qualitative methodand quantitative method of analyzing Europeanization may be applied as a resourceof methodology to provide some practical implications for further researches on theissue of Europeanization.