A Study On The Chinese Versions Of To Kill A Mockingbird From The Perspective Of Feminism

Harper Lee (born April28,1926) was one of the representative novelists of theAmerican south literature. She won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel To Kill aMockingbird in1961. She was honored the President Medal of Freedom in2007. Thenovel enjoys high popularity in western countries. It was selected as “Best novel ofthe century” in a poll by Literary Journal in1999. While surprisingly, there aremerely a few researches on it in China.This thesis is intended to make a comparative study on the two Chinese versionsof the novel from the perspective of feminism. The study will focus on the strategiesthe feminist translators tend to use in translation--supplementing, writing thepreface/afterword, footnoting, hijacking and dealing with their gender marker. It isfound that there are differences between the male and female translators in theirtranslations concerning with the strategies they used. Firstly, the female translatorused more supplementing in translation than the male translator. Secondly, the maletranslator gave an afterword, while female translator did not. Thirdly, the femaletranslator’s footnoting played a more important role than that of the male translator.Fourthly, the female translator hijacked some original text, while the male translatordid not. Fifthly, the female translator avoided some translation of pejorative words,while the male translator is rough and vicious in his translation of such words; and thefemale translator used more formal words and sentences than the male translator.Hopefully, this thesis may be helpful for further researches on the Chinesetranslation of To Kill a Mockingbird and particularly the study on it from the feministperspective.