A Research Of The Translator’s Gender Differences On His/Her Translation Based On The Two Chinese Versions Of Pride And Prejudice

As for the “cultural turn” in translation in the 1980 s, the research perspectives to translation have been broadened largely. Translation connects more closely with other disciplines. Lots of translation viewpoints related to the translator are formed,such as: the feminist translation theory and the translator’s subjectivity. The translator’s subjectivity redefines the fidelity in translation and emphasizes the translator’s subjectivity during the translation process. Meanwhile, the combination of feminism and translation also awakes the translator’s gender awareness. Translators of different genders would like to show their gender identities in their translation. Consequently, more and more researchers begin to pay attention to gender’s influences in the translation. What’s more, it has become a hot field to approach translation from the gender perspective.Men and women, due to different cultivating methods as well as different social requirements, will grow up with different characteristics and cognition. These stable characteristics will have a big influence on their language using. The influences include intonation, grammar, vocabulary, formality of words, sentence structure, etc. Therefore,there should be some different characteristics in language expression between the male and female translators in their translated versions.In this thesis, the writer aims to find the influences of translator’s gender differences on translation based on the two Chinese versions of Pride and Prejudice. Pride and prejudice is a classic and popular works written by Jane Austen. The two versions are respectively produced by the female translator Lei Limei and the male translator Wang Keyi. This research abstracts totally 213 linguistic data from the three research subjects.Three linguistic data are one group. Each group includes the original and its corresponding two translated versions. Through the methods of text analysis, case study, comparative analysis and qualitative description to the linguistic data, the writer intends to seek out the specific influences of translators’ gender differences on their translations. Based on the researchers of the scholars such as Chris Kramer and Sun Rujian, this research will conduct a comparative study from lexical, sentential, emotional aspects as well as the translation strategy. The particular differences in each aspect will be classified and listed indetail.Through this research, the writer finds that the translator’s gender differences indeed affect Wang keyi’s and Lei Limei’s Chinese versions. The specific aspects are presented detailedly in chapter four. Generally speaking, in lexical aspect, the female translator’s words are milder and more formal; the female uses more modal particles; the male uses more pronouns to make his language terse. In the sentential aspect, the male translator uses shorter sentences and their sentences are more concise. In the emotion aspect, the female translator is more exquisite and apropos; their emotion is more intenser and radical than the male. For the translation strategy, the male and female translators employ the free translation and literal translation correspondingly. This research is a further extension of the study of gender and translation. It enriches the study of the translator’s subjectivity.What’s more, understanding the different characteristics of both men and women will help them to develop their shinning points and avoid the flaws so as to improve the translation quality.