A Study Of Jeffrey Kinkley’s Border Town From The Perspective Of Thick Translation

In 1993, Appiah put forward the concept of thick translation, which tries to put the text in a rich cultural and language background to reserve the characteristics of original culture in the form of footnotes, glossaries, an extended introduction and so on to let the targeted culture respect the other language and understand it deeply. In 2007, Theo Hermans further developed thick translation in his paper Thick translation as cross-cultural study. In 2010, Martha P. Y. Cheung published An Anthology of Chinese Discourse on Translation Volume 1:From Earliest Times to the Buddhist Project, which was considered as a success by scholars both at home and abroad. Zhang represented the links between translation and the source culture by contextualization, explication, and grounding. The success of Zhang proves the value of thick translation.Jeffrey kinkley who is known as "the first sinologist conducting a research on Shen Congwen" has engaged in the study of Shen Congwen for more than 30 years. In 2009, Kinkley translated Shen’s master piece Bian Cheng, entitled Border Town, in which thick translation phenomena are prevalent. By adding preface, interpretation in the text and endnotes, the translator puts the target readers in rich historical and cultural background so that they can appreciate Border Town better.There are mainly three forms of thick translation in Border Town: preface, interpretation in the text and endnotes after the text. With nearly two thousand words, the translator described the historic, cultural, political and social background information of Shen’s time, introduced domestic and foreign critic on Shen and the characters and theme of Border Town in different times, and compared the novel with The Good Earth which won the Nobel Prize for literature. Besides, Kinkley cites Shen’s manifesto of authorial intention, which aims to create a Greek temple within which people worship "humanity". The rich historical and cultural background lays a solid foundation for the further reading of Border Town. The second form is the explanations added by translator in the text on source cultural phenomena, such as singing love songs, wedding song, etc. The explanations do not interrupt the reading procedure of the target text readers, but help them obtain a comprehensive understanding of the unique Xiangxi culture. In addition, the translator provided over thirty endnotes which range from geographical features, customs, historical allusion, dialect slang, legends to characters of literary works. Finally based on the above discussion, this paper tries to analyze the cause of thick translation phenomena in Border Town from three aspects, namely readership, social and translator’s ideology, and text type, which contribute to the thick translation phenomena in Border Town.Through thick translation, Jeffrey Kinkley represented language and culture features of Border Town for the target text readers. On one hand, this paper describes thick translation in Border Town, which proves that thick translation phenomena are prevalent. On the other hand, analyses of the forms of thick translation demonstrate the rationality of the translation strategies and the value of thick translation in Border Town.This paper is composed of six parts. The first part is introduction, which makes a brief introduction of the methodology, structure and meaning of this essay. The second part is devoted to introduce the previous and current study on Border Town and thick translation both at home and abroad. The third part is theoretical foundation that interprets the definition, development and main forms of thick translation in detail. The forth part analyzes the thick translation phenomena in Border Town according to the main forms of thick translation in it. The fifth part makes an attempt to find the reasons behind the thick translation in Border Town. The sixth part is a conclusion of the thesis.