On Translator’s Creative Treason In Literary Translation

In the wake of the deepening cultural communication between the East and the West, more and more writers blessed with bilingual ability are apt to carry out "foreign language creation" with literary works written in English involving Chinese culture, thus leading to an irresistible trend of the creation and the translation of these trans-national literary works. For the purpose of exploring a framework for the current literary translation study of these trans-national works featuring profound Chinese culture, this thesis resorts to Lin Yutang’s Moment in Peking and Zhang Zhenyu’s translated version Jing Hua Yan Yun due to the fact that Moment in Peking is lauded as a typical example of "foreign language creation" which has secured a prominent position in introducing China to the West and Jing Hua Yan Yun is its most popular Chinese version in mainland China. Furthermore, considering that rigid fidelity is inadvisable in literary translation, the perspective of creative treason has been employed to examine how the translator’s creative treason performs in the translation process. This thesis endeavors to set up a theoretical framework for current translation studies of trans-national literary works and unveil how creative treason plays a part in endowing the translated text with utmost popularity among the target community.As two major performances of creative treason in Jing Hua Yan Yun, the translator’s creative treason in the language style and in culture reconstruction are expounded in Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 respectively. Chapter 3 concentrates on it from the language style covering translator’s creative input in employing Zhanghui Style, four-character expressions, Beijing dialect, South Fujian dialect and the pure Chinese language. Chapter 4 elaborates on the translator’s creative treason from the perspective of culture reconstruction, coupled with the elucidations of certain translation strategies adopted by the translator, such as individualized translation, deliberate mistranslation, amplification and incomplete translation. Detailed examples involving national codes of ideology, national socialized codes and national audio-visual codes are enumerated to illustrate the success and failure of the translator’s creative treason.Case study and bilingual-corpus based analysis are two major research methods in this descriptive study, with literature analysis and the combination of microscopic and macroscopic study methods as supporting ways. Based on these methodologies, this thesis draws a conclusion from three aspects. Firstly, in the translation of these literary works possessing profound Chinese culture, appropriate employment of translator’s creative treason not only helps achieve fidelity to the content of the original text with the debunking of the absolute fidelity and the textual centralism, but also enhances expressiveness and elegance of the target text, thus reproducing a translated text well-tailored for the target community. Secondly, in the affirmation of the immense practical, literary and cultural effects yielded by translators’creative treason with appropriate and flexible translation strategies, the status of the translator in translation studies is ensured and the translated text is endowed with literariness and independent value, along with the rejuvenating and reconstructing of Chinese culture and the image of China. Finally, it is hoped that the combination of the methods of case study and bilingual-corpus analysis with the perspective of creative treason undertaken by the thesis can be somewhat enlightening for similar translation studies and practice in literary translation.