On Eileen Chang’s Self-translation Of Jinsuoji From The Perspective Of Eco-translatology

Eileen Chang has established herself as one of the bilingual writers and skillful translators in the history of the 20th-century Chinese literature. From the 1950s, Eileen Chang began to translate her own works. Jinsuoji, a work of milestone significance of Eileen Chang, is radiant with charm of art:the rich rhetoric devices, the vivid description of images and the usage of numerous culture-loaded words, grant the novel with unique Chinese flavor.Recently, researches and studies on Eileen Chang and her works have been more active. From the perspective of Eco-translatology, this thesis tries to study Eileen Chang’s self-translation of Jinsuoji. Professor Hu pointed out that translation is "a selection activity of the translator’s adaptation to the translational eco-environment". Eileen Chang’s bilingualism and biculturalism made her adapt to the "translation eco-environment" with Jinsuoji and Chinese culture as its main components. During the translation process, Eileen Chang made some adaptive selections in linguistic, cultural and communicative dimensions. Eileen Chang remained faithful to the source text, employing foreignization as the main strategy and adopting literal translation, literal translation plus footnotes, transliteration plus footnotes to deal with Chinese idioms and culture-loaded words. Moreover, she also applied addition, alteration to get the communicative effect Through study on three dimensions, this thesis attempts to prove that Eileen Chang has struck a balance between readability and cultural otherness.The thesis is comprised of five chapters. Chapter one is a concise introduction, where the author of this thesis introduces the background, the purpose, the significance, the methodology and the structure. Chapter two firstly gives a brief review on "self-translation" at home and abroad, a concise introduction to Eileen Chang and her self-translated works and a review on Eileen Chang’s self-translation; then Chapter two also states development of Eco-trans late logy. Chapter three is the theoretical framework of the thesis in which the author gives a detailed interpretation of Eco-translatology. Chapter four is the main body of the thesis; it provides systematic analysis of Eileen Chang’s self-translation of Jinsuoji in light of Eco-translatology, which includes Eileen Chang’s adaptation and selection on linguistic dimension, cultural dimension and communicative dimension. Chapter five makes a summary of the whole thesis, in which the limitations of the thesis and suggestions in doing further studies are pointed out.