Studies On The Translator’s Gender On Literary Translation—Comparison Of Two Chinese Versions Of The Bell Jar

As the representative of American confessional poetry, Sylvia Plath(1932-1963) is recognized as one of the most outstanding female poets among the writers of English. Her poetry Ariel was published seven times and achieved the Pulitzer Prize for poetry of 1982. The Bell Jar is the only one novel in her short life, which still made a huge difference in the American modern history of literature.Gender is a core concept of the feminist translation theory. Translators with different gender identity will have different understanding of the original text and choose different expressions in the translated text. Both male and female translators will show their own gender identity consciously or unconsciously.Feminist translators tend to fight against patriarchy through the subversion of language. They also attempt to show translator’s identity in their translation and adopt feminist translation strategies to manipulate the original text. In this thesis,the author adopts comparative method to analyze the effect of gender identity of different translators on the two Chinese versions of The Bell Jar respectively by man translator Zhu Shida and woman translator Yang Jing. The comparison shows that woman translator and man translator have different understandings of the novel from their gender identity, which is visible in the translation text.Female translators will strengthen the standpoint of the feminist writers in the process of translation.In introduction, there is a brief introduction of the writing objectives,significance and the structure of the thesis, Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar and its two Chinese versions as well as the literature review of The Bell Jar home and abroad.In the first chapter, the author presents the theoretical basis of the thesis, in which the author introduces the main points of the feminist translation theory and explains the relationship between gender identity and translation. The main body of the thesis contains three chapters, in which the author makes a detailedcomparison between the two Chinese versions of The Bell Jar. In the second chapter, the author mainly makes a comparison of the two translated versions from the differences in the lexical, syntactical and textual level. In the third chapter, the author makes a comparison of the two translated versions of expressions concerned with feminist ideologies. In the fourth chapter, the author makes a comparison of the translation strategies. The female translator adopts the feminist translation strategies to manipulate the text and highlight feminist ideas.The last chapter is the conclusion of the thesis. The author has found that, in the course of translation, gender identity influences translators’ comprehension and expression. Because of different life and emotion experiences, women translators can do more to cooperate with feminist writers in developing and strengthening the feminist ideas in the original while the men translators fail to do so.