A Study On Novels Translated By Chen Hongbi From The Perspective Of Polysystem Theory

Study of translation history is one of the inalienable part in translation study and the part that needs more deep exploration, especially the one on translators. A lot of talented translators were born in late Qing Dynasty with the start of literary translation at that time. However, most scholars only gave attention to famous translators like Yan Fu, Lin Shu and even Liang Qichao, who were also male translators while most people did not know that the first group of female translators also began to emerge then. Studies on these female translators have been increasing in recent years in China. Most scholars found out the contributions of these female translators, however, most the scholars started from the perspective of feminism, and studies on female translators as individuals were rare. The author attempts to conduct individual study on woman translator on the basis of studies of scholars before and explore the woman translator Chen Hongbi to find if she had anything different compared with the entire group. After the close reading of the novels translated by Chen Hongbi, the author found that feminism was not a suitable perspective to study her translations as though a female translator she was, she chose the originals with different concerns from that of other female translators. Her choices during translating conformed to the mainstream of literary translation at her time to a large extent in terms of choice of originals and the concerns of her translated novels, which did not differ too much from that of male translators at her time as the genres of her translations including historical novels with revolutionary color and popular detective novels, while the main concerns showed the thirst for independence, freedom, justice and law, which were haunted themes in the novels translated by male translators as woman translators cared more about stuff like family and love. On the other hand, she had her own innovation in translation. She respected the original more than the others when translating and made her efforts to improve “acceptability” in the premise of adequate “adequacy”. She adopted notes and para-texts to explain nouns, customs, unique objects, and she retained a certain amount of environment descriptions and psychological descriptions, which showed her change in narrative pattern compared with other translators at that time. And through these and the flashbacks we could see her effort in improving the acceptability of the novels while retaining their adequacy. The correlations between her translated novels and the one in home co-system are also worth exploration.