Creative Treason In Modern Chinese Prose Translation

Chinese modern prose writings, with their delicate elegance melted in forms of no clear focus have become an integral part of our native literary field and the successful translation of them into English will naturally contribute to the cultural exchange between western countries and China. Creative treason, ever since its introduction into China, has witnessed tons of researches and it has certainly threaded its way into literary translation. However, in the field of prose translation, there has been little attention paid to the systematic use of creative treason and factors that might block the success of it have yet to be explored.This paper, by contrasting those traditional theories and ideas proves that creative treason is reasonable. Supported by hermeneutics and more importantly, the author’s own experience in translating Thoughts in a Serene Night into 3 different versions over a period of 3 years, it demonstrates that creative treason is an objective existence in our translation practice and then the author goes on to explore standards in translation aesthetics for the use of it.The major part of this thesis deals with ways that creative treason could be applied in two separate systems-the linguistic system and the non-linguistic system. In the former one, it mainly refers to acoustical treason, lexical treason and syntactic treason, the latter one being imagery treason only. These treasons, if given a closer look, all of them indicate a deeper fidelity.At last, two aspects that strangle creative treason are also discussed, the first one being Chinese English which includes the plague of abstract nouns, the excessive use of words like "make" that contributes to nothing meaningful as well as the incautious use of emphatic words such as "great", "very", etc; the second one being the festering faith which refers to the translators’ fear of pity and curb of creation in their practice. Both of them could be considered as a kind of treason in that they, to a degree, are different from the original texts. Yet such negative treasons should be always avoided.With our unique treasonous creation that sticks to fidelity in the deep, we are bound to come up with numerous quality translations.