On The C-E Translation Of Martial Arts Fiction From The Perspective Of Eco-translatology

Chinese martial arts fiction, for its powerful Kung Fu, lofty Jianghu chivalry, unexpected plots as well as the extensive and profound traditional Chinese culture, has attracted increasing readers from all trades and professions. However, the westward spread of such a kind of interesting fiction is not in smooth going. What’s more, the English translation of Chinese martial arts fiction has not attracted attention until recent years, and studies on it are mostly making justifications for one translation from certain perspective, or arguing about the translation method of proper nouns, with few pointing out the limitations of the English translation of Chinese martial arts fiction.This thesis conducts a study of English translation of Chinese martial arts fiction from the standpoint of Eco-translatology, which offers a comprehensive criterion to evaluate the translation. Under the guide of the evaluation criterion of Eco-translatology, cases taken from the English translation of Jin Yong’s Shu Jian En Chou Lu, The Book & The Sword by Graham Earnshaw are analyzed.The evaluation criterion of Eco-translatology is the “degree of holistic adaptation and selection”, which includes three aspects to refer to. They are: degree of multi-dimensional transformation; reader’s feedback; and translator quality. According to Hu Gengshen,multi-dimension mainly includes dimensions of linguistic, culture and communication.Because these three dimensions are what translators and translation theorists concern most in translation. During the evaluation, the thesis makes a comparative analysis of the English version of Jin Yong’s Shu Jian En Chou Lu and the original version from linguistic, cultural and communicative dimensions. That’s also the most important part of the evaluation. In addition, the thesis makes analyses of the English version from the aspects of reader’sfeedback and translator quality.Through the analysis, it is found that the English version of Shu Jian En Chou Lu translated by Graham Earnshaw has relatively high “degree of holistic adaptation and selection”. However, it still has deficiencies. To be specific, mistranslations and loss of culture may bring puzzlement for western readers and so many omissions and rewritings will conceal the characteristic of original language and change original character images. To address those problems, proposals on the English translation of Chinese martial arts fiction are put forward: transliterating and literally translating the culture-loaded words with annotations or appendixes providing rich cultural and language context; establishing related corpora and compiling dictionaries of related terms. Because such “thick translation”, related corpora and dictionaries are beneficial for the normalization of English translation of Chinese martial arts fiction and the westward spread of it.The thesis comprises five chapters. Chapter 1 introduces briefly the research background,research purpose and significance, research questions of the thesis and research methods employed in the study. Chapter 2 gives a general review of previous studies of English translation of Chinese martial arts fiction and studies on The Book & The Sword translated by Graham Earnshaw. Chapter 3 is the thesis’ s theoretical basis. Eco-translatology, especially the Eco-translatological evaluation criterion, is introduced in detail. Chapter 4 makes an evaluation of The Book & The Sword under the guide of Eco-translatological evaluation criterion. Through evaluation, the thesis makes positive comments on the translation’s degree of holistic adaptation and selection, and show clearly its limitations. In Chapter 5, research questions put forward before are answered, and suggestions for future study of English translation of Chinese martial arts fiction are given.