Translation And Image Reconstruction

A galaxy of Chinese American writers have become active in American literature and the number of Chinese American literary works has increased dramatically since 1970 s, and Chinese American literature has entered a prosperous stage. Chinese American literature, as an important branch of American minority literature, has drawn widespread attention in educational circles in recent twenty years.The thesis will take Snow Flower and the Secret Fan written by a promising Chinese American writer Lisa See as a case study with the following reasons. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan gives an account of the friendship between two females Lily and Snow Flower living in the Jiang Yong County of Hunan Province which lasted for a lifetime in the 19 th century. In the novel, substantial real historical events such as female foot-binding, famine and pestilence and the Taiping Rebellion are adopted and a plenty of descriptions of images of China are interwoven. There are a lot of studies on Snow Flower and the Secret Fan in China and abroad, but studies on the translation of Snow Flower and the Secret Fan are few.The translation of the novel is involved in some problems appearing in the course of translating the images of China in the eyes of the Chinese American writer back into China because there are images of China in Snow Flower and the Secret Fan. Are images of China in the translated work loyal and objective to those in the original work? Are images of China in the original work transformed and distorted? If so, what are the images of China in the translated work? How are they constructed by translating? Why does the translator change the backward and brutal images of China in the source text when translating? These questions will be studied and solved in the thesis.The thesis is going to conduct a study on the Chinese version of Snow Flower and the Secret Fan translated by Xin Yuanjie on the basis of the theory of imagology in comparative literature and postcolonial translation theory. By comparing the English version and the Chinese version, the thesis aims to discuss the changed images of China, to explore the power struggle between two cultures hidden in the transformation of the translated work, to probe into the translation methods that the translator adopt under the influence of power differentials and the reasons, and to further discuss the construction of the translator’s national culture identity and the translator’s decolonizing consciousness. In the end, the thesis is intended to reveal that the translator changes the ugly and backward images of China shaped in the source text and reconstructs a better image of China because the translator is evidently dominated by the traditional native Chinese ideology and her attitude towards translation is reader oriented, and on the other hand, the translator does so for the sake of constructing the national cultural identity, maintaining the purity of native cultural images and resisting the cultural colonization of the western hegemonic culture.