On Chinese To English Science Fiction Translation With The Three-Body Problem As An Example

On August23rd,2013, an announcement sent shock waves through the Chinese and American science fiction communities:the master piece of Liu Cixin, a Chinese science fiction writer, the Three-Body Problem would soon be published in the US. That was the first time that a saga science fiction from Mainland China got published by a western mainstream publishing house. However, as science fiction originated from the western world, China was slow to catch up. Therefore, there are not, many people in the Chinese academia studying science fiction, let alone its translation.The paper first looks back at the existing studies on sci-fi translation and basically divides them into three categories:translation case studies, historical studies and systematic studies on sci-fi translation. In terms of quantity, the first two categories are the majority. And among the very few systematic studies, professor Guo Jianzhong’s work is the most recognized one. In his book Studies of Sci-Tech Translation, he proposed three guiding principles for English-to-Chinese sci-fi translation:sci-fi translation should retain the work’s literary value, the plain language and the science factor.However, these three principles failed to cover all aspects of sci-fi translation. For example, in Guo’s explanation of "the literary value", he left out important factors such as the unique cultural and historical background information as well as figures of speech including metaphor. In addition, Guo’s definition of "plain language" and "science factor" were too abstract to be applied to real translation practice. To improve the three principles, the author of this paper discusses in detail how to tackle four prominent problems in sci-fi translation:the cultural and historical background information, figures of speech including metaphor, technical contents and pure fictional contents in hope of helping to advance the Chinese sci-fi translation cause.