Cultural Deformation And Reformulation Strategies In The English And Chinese Versions Of Disney’s Mulan

With the development of globalization, cultural interactions become more and more frequent and complex. Transculturation, as one of the important forms of cultural interactions in the global context, refers to the process of reshaping orremaking a form of cultural representation by way of adapting or absorbing elements from another culture. As an animation production giant in America, Disney Corporation hunts for creative inspirations worldwide and employs foreign stories from various cultures to reproduce its own transculturated animated features. Transculturation is an obviouscharacteristic in Disney’s transculturated animated features and it is important to understand cultural deformations and reformulations in Disney’s transculturated animated features.Transculturation is a complex process, existing within a culture itself and between different cultures. Subject to different purposes of cultural producers, transculturation may undergo different processes in different cultural fields. It is hard to arrive at a universal routine that is applied in all cultural fields. However, in certain specific cultural fields, the process and regulations of transculturation can be explored and perceived.Taking Itamar Even-Zohar’s theory of cultural transfer and the relevant theory of transculturation as the theoretical basis and using a comparative, descriptive and explanatory method, this thesis conducts a systematic study of the strategies for the cultural deformations, restorations and reformulations employed in the English and Chinese versions of Disney’s animated film Mulan. The English version of Mulan takes its basic story from the Chinese legend of Mulan in ancient times, especially from the Mulan Ballad. Disney adapted the legend of Mulan by using such strategies as addition, omission, alteration, specification and explicitation so as to cater to the target audiences in America and other parts of the world. This kind of cultural adaptation can be viewed as a type of trans-editing in its broad sense. In the Chinese version of Mulan, the translator conducts a restoration of some distorted Chinese elements to their original forms, which is a kind of domesticating translation strategy. As for some other distorted cultural elements in the English version of Mulan, the translator keeps their forms, or conducts a creative rendering of them with the contemporary Chinese language, which is a kind of foreignizing translation strategy. Finally, based on Even-Zohar’s model of cultural transfer, the thesis explores the paths and trajectories of intra-cultural transfer of the Mulan Ballad within Chinese culture and its inter-cultural transfer between China and America. And advantages and disadvantages are analyzed from a dialectical angle with respect to Disney’s appropriation and adaptation of materials from foreign cultures.The English and Chinese versions of Disney’s Mulan witness a cultural return trip of traditional Chinese culture. In the overall process of Chinese culture’s going global and returning home, Chinese and Western cultures clash with each other and they are integrated into a new and hybrid cultural form. This is an important channel for cultural innovation and progress. As far as translation is concerned, the findings of the present study have verified the viewpoint of some scholars that all translations are more or less a kind of rewriting or manipulation of the original texts for a certain purpose. This kind of rewriting or manipulation is closely related to the cultural adapter or translator as the subject. An analysis of these subjects with respect to their ideological background and the patronage system in which they live a life can help seek the reasons hidden behind this kind of rewriting or manipulation.